We have a lot to unpack this week. On the latest episode of Fully-Booked: Literary Podcast, Meaghan and Shirin sat down to tackle one of the most talked-about releases of the season: Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
The hype had been building for weeks, and both hosts went in with eyes wide open. What they found was a visually stunning film that left them split on just about everything else. If you’ve been going back and forth on whether to watch this one, buckle up, because this conversation covers the good, the bad, and the deeply frustrating.
Note
The following is an editorialized transcript of our weekly literary podcast. If you would like to listen to the podcast, click the play button above orlisten on your favorite platform with the links below.
Doing the Homework: Revisiting the Source Material
Before heading to the theater, Meaghan decided to fully immerse herself in the world of Wuthering Heights again. She watched two other film adaptations, did some reading, and even listened to part of the audiobook. As she put it, she wanted to get back into the headspace of what actually happens in Emily Brontë’s novel, because “we all know that the movie is not gonna be what actually happens in the book.”
For a quick refresher, Meaghan walked us through some literary history. Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. Tragically, she passed away just a year later at the age of 30 after catching a severe cold at her brother’s funeral, which likely worsened existing tuberculosis.
The novel wasn’t a hit right away. Its characters were considered too immoral and harsh for the era, especially coming from a female author. It wasn’t until her sister Charlotte Brontë did a revised re-edit, republished around 1850, that the novel started gaining the reputation it holds today.
Meaghan specifically watched a 1998 TV film version starring Robert Cavanaugh and Orla Brady, which she described as one of the more faithful adaptations to the text. It follows the narrative structure closely, including Mr. Lockwood as the framing device, and delivers solid performances despite its TV-movie production values.
She also watched a grittier 2011 theatrical version starring James Howson, a Black man, as Heathcliff and Kaya Scodelario as Catherine. That version leaned hard into the realism and the racism inherent in the story, but, much like Fennell’s film, stripped away the second half of the novel. Without that resolution, Meaghan said the takeaway was simply, “well, that was fucking depressing.”
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The Casting Conversation and What Got Lost
One of the biggest ongoing discussions around this adaptation has been the casting of Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff is explicitly described as a person of color, with the general consensus placing him somewhere between Romani and South Asian descent. Fennell cast Jacob Elordi, a white man, in the role, and the hosts had plenty to say about that decision.
Meaghan pointed out that Fennell has dodged this question in interviews with impressive skill, never quite addressing why she didn’t cast a person of color. What makes it stranger, the hosts noted, is that this version of Heathcliff is so toned down and romanticized that the racial component wouldn’t have added the kind of difficult-to-watch intensity it brought to the 2011 version.
Man, you coulda done it and it would have been fine
Both hosts agreed that Dev Patel, for instance, would have been a perfect fit. “He’s handsome. He’s well spoken. He can vacillate between calm and angry,” Meaghan said, and Shirin agreed it would have shifted the entire movie by casting an actor like that.
Beyond the Heathcliff casting, the hosts felt that Margot Robbie, while talented, was a strange fit for Catherine. “I kept looking at Margot Robbie, and I was like, I feel like I’m watching Margot Robbie,” Shirin admitted.
Catherine, in the novel, has dark hair, and the Linton family (Edgar and Isabella) are the blonde, blue-eyed, pale ones. Casting Robbie essentially flipped that visual contrast on its head. There’s also the matter of age. Robbie is 35, and Elordi is 28, and while the gap isn’t dramatic, watching Robbie play the bratty, childish version of Catherine felt off.
“Her whininess in this movie was just not really working for me,” Shirin said, adding that the younger actors who played the childhood versions were far more believable. The hosts gave a special shout-out to Owen Cooper from Adolescence, who played young Heathcliff and delivered a charming, natural performance.
Then there’s the massive elephant in the room: the complete absence of Hindley, Catherine’s brother, who is responsible for the majority of Heathcliff’s suffering in the novel. Meaghan realized about five or six minutes in that “there’s an entire character missing.” In the book, Hindley’s abuse of Heathcliff is a driving force behind his rage and his eventual revenge plot.
Without Hindley, the movie loses the context that makes Heathcliff’s darkness make sense. Instead, what we got was a Heathcliff who seems vaguely content tending to animals on the moors. “You’re supposed to be so angry that you’re ready to kill everybody,” Meaghan said. “Where he has these outbursts and stuff, and he feels violent and dangerous. That’s part of the point of the character.”
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A Gorgeous Film That Can’t Stick the Landing
Both hosts agreed on one thing without reservation: the movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at. The cinematography by Linus Sandgren, who previously shot La La Land, No Time to Die, and Saltburn, is breathtaking. The costumes were interesting and eye-catching, and the Charlie XCX-heavy soundtrack was a fun, modern touch that neither host minded. “Nobody’s surprised,” Meaghan said of the visuals. “Nobody is surprised about that.“
But beauty alone can’t carry a film that’s trying to adapt one of the most psychologically rich novels in English literature. The hosts identified a recurring issue with Fennell’s work across all three of her films: she has a brilliant eye for aesthetics but struggles to land whatever deeper message she’s aiming for. “When she tries to bring home a message about something, it doesn’t really land,” Meaghan said. Shirin offered a theory that stuck: Fennell comes from a very wealthy background (her father, Theo Fennell, is a high-end jewelry designer), and while she seems to have a social conscience, she can’t quite bridge the gap between identifying classism and actually saying something meaningful about it.
She’s trying to give you something, but she can’t quite get there,
Shirin said. “We’re not sticking the landing.”
This version of Wuthering Heights, the hosts argued, plays more like romanticized fan fiction than an actual adaptation. The middle portion devolves into what Shirin described as a “smutty romance montage” of Catherine and Heathcliff having sex everywhere, none of which happens in the book since the two never actually end up together.
The Isabella subplot was particularly bothersome. In the novel, Heathcliff’s calculated cruelty toward Isabella is one of his defining monstrous acts. In the film, there’s a bizarre consent conversation before things turn dark, and then it gets retconned when Isabella seems to be fine with being chained up. “What the fuck am I watching?” Meaghan said. “It’s so stupid.”
And like the 2011 version, the film ends abruptly after Catherine’s death, cutting the entire second half of the novel. That second half is where the generational trauma theme actually resolves, where Heathcliff eventually finds forgiveness and the next generation breaks the cycle. Without it, you just get tragedy without catharsis. “You cannot tell me that in 2026, we are not able to actually analyze this and come out with the adaptation that provides this on a silver platter for us,” Shirin said, clearly frustrated.
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The Nelly of It All: Hong Chau Steals the Show
If there’s one thing both hosts agreed elevated this film above its problems, it was Hong Chau’s performance as Nelly. “If it hadn’t been for Nelly, I think Nelly made this movie,” Shirin declared. And Meaghan was right there with her: “She was phenomenal.”
The hosts broke down Nelly’s arc in meticulous detail. From the opening scene, you see Nelly as Catherine’s closest companion, someone who genuinely loves her. But the moment Heathcliff arrives, that dynamic shifts. You can see the sadness on her face as she realizes she’s being replaced. Then comes the jealousy, building slowly under Chau’s incredibly restrained performance.
You could see exactly what she was upset about, exactly what she was doing the whole time, why she was jealous, what her motivations were
The turning point, according to the hosts, comes during the famous closed-door conversation where Catherine tells Nelly that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. Nelly knows Heathcliff is listening outside and engineers the conversation accordingly. But when Catherine cuts her with the line about how Nelly has never loved anyone and no one has ever loved her, something breaks.
“There’s a look that crosses Nelly’s face,” Meaghan described, “and it’s like, but I loved you, Katherine. I loved you. And now I think I’m done with this now.” From that moment, Nelly’s mission becomes clear: get herself out of that miserable situation and into a life with pretty dresses, warm beds, and good food. Every move she makes is quiet and calculated, and Chau nails every beat of it.
The irony, both hosts noted, is that the character with the most depth in the entire film operates almost in the background while the camera fixates on two beautiful leads with decent but unremarkable chemistry. “It’s almost like the movie’s trying to distract you to be like, but look at these two beautiful people over here,” Meaghan said. “And I’m like, well, I don’t care now.”
Final Verdict: Two Very Different Scores
This is where Meaghan and Shirin parted ways, and it made for an entertaining wrap-up. Shirin, who went in without having freshly revisited the novel, gave the film a 7 out of 10. She enjoyed herself, appreciated the effort and the craft on display, and had a good time at the movies even if the story left her wanting more.
Meaghan? Not so much. She landed on a 4 out of 10 and didn’t mince words about it. “I would never watch this again. I will listen to the soundtrack on repeat, but I will never watch this film again.” She recounted how her partner, Arthur, looked at her when they left the theater and knew immediately she was annoyed. And she was. The deep dive into the source material earlier that week made the film’s shortcomings impossible to ignore.
The hosts did note that the film clearly works for audiences going in blind. Meaghan observed girls in her screening crying at the end, which tracks if you take it purely as a tragic romance. But if you know the story, if you’ve sat with these characters and understood the generational trauma at the novel’s core, this adaptation feels like a missed opportunity wrapped in gorgeous cinematography.
As Shirin summed it up, this wasn’t really an adaptation.
This was about making her romanticized version when she was like 13 and she read this book.
And honestly? That might be the most accurate description of this film we’ve heard yet.
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