What Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Can Teach Screenwriters

Emerald Fennell, who won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2020’s Promising Young Woman, set her sights this year on Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights as the subject of her newest film. Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordie, "Wuthering Heights" is a loose adaptation of the novel. It’s an emotional film, beautifully written and crafted film for those able to divorce themselves from the source material. The film has a look unique to itself, but brings to mind the brilliant Technicolor dreams of the Powell and Pressburger with the set design flourishes of Guillermo del Toro. Everything is done with intention and it cuts thematically deeper than many of the critics will lead you to believe.

Fennell has proved herself a deft hand with a screenplay and in the director’s chair. It builds on the original novel, exploring through a unique view the themes of abuse and trauma that lead to the ill-fated love of Catherine and Heathcliff and how they can never truly be together and why they are so doomed.

Adapting any book is no easy challenge, let alone one as dense or beloved as the Brontë classic, but I found this one particularly deft and focused, and it offered a pair of cogent lessons for screenwriters.

Fennell told Fandango that the reason she put quotes around the title is that she believed any adaptation of a book should have quotation marks around it. “You can't adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can't say I'm making Wuthering Heights. It's not possible. What I can say is I'm making a version of it. There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. And there's a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is "Wuthering Heights", and it isn’t.”

There are definitely audiences that are coming to see the book projected directly to the screen, but more often than not, the most faithful adaptations are usual the most banal. The best adaptations have nothing to do with fidelity to the source material and everything to do with the vision of the writer and filmmaker bringing it to life, as they see something special and unique through their own lens.

Consider Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of Stephen King’s The Shining—something the two were at odds about for the rest of Kubrick’s life. I spoke to Alan Rudolph about his adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Breakfast of Champions and he said the advice given to him by both Vonnegut and Robert Altman (who commissioned the screenplay originally in the 1970s) was to forget the book and write a screenplay based on what made a movie work. Rewatching Breakfast of Champions and “Wuthering Heights” through the lens of these incredibly competent filmmakers with dense, otherwise unfilmable material and see what makes their hearts and heads tick is a fascinating window into an artist.

This version of Wuthering Heights offers us an emotional view of Brontë through the eyes of Fennell and that has a different context and value. As a writer, understanding that your perspective is just as valuable as the source. Yes, there are some audiences that will be upset that they’re not getting their preferred interpretation, but they’re going to say the book is better anyway and they don’t understand the difference between the two media anyway. Don’t worry about making them happy. Find your passion in the source material. What makes you excited about it? What makes it yours? Figure that out and make that your North Star.

“Wuthering Heights” does an excellent job of streamlining the narrative. The original novel is almost 110,000 words long. Your average screenplay might top out at 30,000 words, and most of those are stage direction. There has to be a lot of condensing.

There have been many adaptations of the source material and most of them have many of the same narrative deletions from the source material. Most omit the second half of the book, involving the children of Heathcliff and Catherine and the manipulations and abuse they endure at the hands of their parents in their games of jealousy. Some lean harder into the supernatural elements of the book than others, but at its core, all of them deal with the love that cannot be between Heathcliff and Catherine as they circle each other from childhood. Common to all the adaptations are themes of cruelty, class, and jealousy.

It’s not uncommon for huge portions of novels to be removed for adaptations, these are choices writers have to make to cut to the core of what makes a novel important. Especially when a writer looks at it through the lens of what makes them feel excited about it. One of my favorite book adaptations, both masterpieces, are Steinbeck and Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), yet Kazan’s film version barely touches the tail end of the novel. William Goldman’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery (1990) wisely omits one of the major features of the novel—all of the romance scenes that take readers into the world of Misery and her novels. Goldman also omitted himself as a character and from the first third of the book in his own adaptation of The Princess Bride (1987). I think people forget that the first hundred pages of that novel are Goldman himself racing around looking for a copy of S. Morgenstern’s book.

While Fennell’s adaptation combines some characters and situations, according to Vogue, she went to some of the best for inspiration for how to do it. One of my favorite adaptations she went to comes from one of my favorite books. Neil Jordan’s 1999 take on Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1999) brilliantly combines characters to compress the narrative. In the film, Jason Isaacs plays a priest who is an amalgamation of two characters in the novel who serve two functions that are two sides of the same thematic coin.

It’s no wonder Fennell took this same approach with the characters of Mr. Earnshaw and Hindley. In the book, Heathcliff is taken in by the noble Mr. Earnshaw and abused by his adopted brother Hindley. When Earnshaw dies, Hindley takes over the estate and turns Heathcliff into a servant.

In the film, combining the characters enables Fennell to say so much more about class, child abuse, and the nature of Heathcliff’s character and the duality of good and evil inside both of them. Since the film also does away with the last of the book, there’s no need to build on those themes, instead putting a laser focus on Heathcliff and Earnshaw themselves.

If it makes the story stronger, don’t hesitate to combine characters. This doesn’t hold true for adaptations of books, but consider this in the adaptation of historical stories, too. William Goldman did that when working on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and others, just to tidy the narrative into something more manageable.

That goes double for thematic territory. This film hyper-focuses on the trauma and abuse from the novel, clearing away many of the other themes the book explores to narrow in on this one, and even highlight it with a more modern understanding and elevate it in some ways. There’s a scene where Mr. Earnshaw is about to punish Catherine for being late for his birthday, the hallmarks of an abusive, drunken old man. Heathcliff steps in and takes the abuse himself, rescuing her from it.

It’s particularly powerful and poignant, serving as a microcosm for the abuse that Heathcliff is willing to endure, but also what he’s willing to inflict in order to ensure Catherine is in his thrall. The screenplay continues building on this like a snowball rolling downhill, but modernizes it, too. When he finally decides to marry Isobella, he actually asks for her consent every step of the way, ensuring she knows exactly what she’s signing up for. His cruelty and his kindness act as a strange duality, truly the demon lover.

Fennell crafted something that was in the mold of Brontë's original novel, but that was uniquely her. Some will be quick to dismiss it—some have already—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth study.

It’s also worth looking at it as it’s own individual work of art. Every adaptation from a book ought to stand on its own and the book should be thrown out and not regarded or referenced when viewing an adaptation. Each adaptation should be viewed almost as if in a vacuum, through the lens of the artist adapting it. Take Frankenstein (2025), we don’t judge Guillermo del Toro’s version by the same standards as James Whale’s, nor do we judge either of those by the same standards as Kenneth Branagh’s. And none of them are as close to the novel as Mary Shelley likely would have liked, but each are beautiful in their own way.

For “Wuthering Heights”, if you aren’t capable of finding beauty in the 2026 iteration, there are almost two dozen others to pick from. I just haven’t seen one that had this much intensity, visual flair, or emotion baked right into the page.

“Wuthering Heights” is currently in wide release. Bring tissues.