Honestly, I went into Wuthering Heights with low expectations. Every adaptation of the Brontë novel since 1939 has either been too tame or too overcooked. Emerald Fennell’s version, which dropped on HBO Max this week with Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, lands somewhere I wasn’t expecting. It’s polarizing. Loud. Sometimes brilliant. Often uncomfortable.
The film opened in select US theaters on May 1 and hit HBO Max on May 11. Word of mouth has been all over the map. Letterboxd is split right down the middle. Critics are using phrases like “visceral fever dream” and “tonally lost.” Both reads are kind of true.
Look. Wuthering Heights was never supposed to be a comfortable book. Brontë wrote two cousins, deeply broken people, in a generational cycle of obsession and cruelty. If you’ve read the novel, you know it’s basically a 19th-century horror story dressed as a romance. Fennell, the same filmmaker who gave us Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, leans into that exact reading. Hard.
What Critics Are Actually Saying
Reviews split into two camps and there’s barely any middle ground.
Camp one says Fennell finally cracked the novel. They point to the eroticism, the violence, the refusal to soften Heathcliff into a romantic hero. They love that Robbie plays Cathy as a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and isn’t sorry. They love the moors photography. The score. The fact that nobody in this film is rooting for love to win.
Camp two says Fennell made a music video version of the novel. Style over substance. They argue the pacing is broken. That the eroticism overwhelms the emotional throughline. That casting Australian-Hollywood A-listers in 19th-century Yorkshire feels off in a way that takes you out of the film.
Both camps agree on one thing: this is not a faithful adaptation. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on which camp you join.
Why Margot Robbie Took This Part
Robbie has been very public about why she said yes. In a recent interview she called Cathy “the most complicated woman I’ve ever read on a page.” Coming off Barbie and the Oscars run, she could’ve taken any role she wanted. She picked this one specifically because Fennell promised her version wouldn’t sanitize Cathy.
That promise gets kept. Robbie’s Cathy is selfish, cruel, magnetic, and self-aware about all of it. She’s not a tragic victim of circumstance. She’s an active participant in her own destruction. Some viewers will love that read. Some will hate it.
My take: it’s the single best performance Robbie has given. Bigger than Barbie. Bigger than I, Tonya. The Oscar conversation in November is going to be loud.
The Jacob Elordi Question
Elordi as Heathcliff was the biggest casting debate before release. He’s 6’5″, impossibly handsome, and Australian, none of which screams “tormented dark-skinned outcast on the Yorkshire moors.” The casting drew weeks of online discourse before anyone had seen a frame.
Having watched it, the casting choice is the film’s most defensible decision. Elordi plays Heathcliff as a man who looks like he should fit in but doesn’t, and the gap between his appearance and his treatment is the entire emotional engine of the second half. It works. Whether it works enough to silence the casting debate is a different question.
The Stuff Nobody’s Talking About
Most coverage has been about the Margot Robbie performance and the sex scenes. Fair enough, both deserve discussion. But the technical achievement here is real and underrated.
The cinematography by Linus Sandgren (who shot La La Land and Saltburn for Fennell before) is gorgeous. The score by Anthony Willis goes places I haven’t heard a period drama score go in a decade. The production design captures Yorkshire in 1801 without leaning on the usual BBC-mossy-stone clichés.
Saltburn fans will recognize Fennell’s signature: long static shots, deliberate strangeness, lighting that feels almost wrong on purpose. If you liked the visual language of Saltburn, this is more of that, dialed up.
Why This Matters for Hollywood
Wuthering Heights is one of the biggest A24/HBO Max bets of 2026. It cost a reported $45 million, premiered at the Cannes opener, and is being positioned as a 2027 awards contender. The early box office split (modest theatrical opening, strong HBO Max engagement) is the story studios are watching.
If Wuthering Heights ends up an awards contender despite mid theatrical numbers, it proves Hollywood’s new playbook: limited theatrical window for prestige, then a streaming push that drives both viewership and awards buzz. Saltburn already showed this could work. Wuthering Heights is the bigger budget test.
It’s a different conversation than the trailer wars happening elsewhere this season (we wrote about the Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer release a few weeks back, which is the opposite playbook). Both strategies are betting on a fragmented attention economy.
Should You Watch It
Here’s the thing.
If you like prestige drama with discomfort baked in, watch it. You’ll either love it or hate it but you won’t be bored.
If you’re hoping for a faithful adaptation that treats the novel as a love story, skip it. You’ll be miserable.
If you’re a Margot Robbie completist, this is required viewing regardless. Her performance is the strongest argument the film makes for itself.
Honestly the most useful Letterboxd review I read just said: “Watched it twice. Hated it the first time. Liked it the second.” That tracks. This is a film designed to provoke a strong first reaction and reveal more on second pass.
Why This Matters
For Americans tracking the streaming wars, Wuthering Heights is the test case for whether HBO Max can pull off a Saltburn-scale moment with a bigger budget and bigger stars. The viewership numbers leak in 10 days. If they’re strong, expect more period dramas getting the prestige-streaming treatment. If they’re weak, the studios pull back and we’re back to franchise sequels and reality TV (which is also where the ad money is going).
USABlaze Takeaway
Wuthering Heights is the most-discussed movie of May 2026, and that conversation isn’t slowing down. Whether it ends up a flop, a sleeper hit, or a Best Picture nominee, the early signal is clear: people want to talk about it. Studios will read that signal.
If you watch it this weekend, tell me which camp you land in. The split between camp one and camp two is roughly 50/50 from what I’ve seen and it’s not what most people predict going in.
Sources: Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, CBR, Screen Rant, Collider.
By The USABlaze Editorial Desk