Critics at Large | The New Yorker Critics at Large Live: “Wuthering Heights” and Its Afterlives
Feb 26, 2026
A live conversation about why Emily Brontë’s strange, intense novel keeps inspiring bold retellings. They debate Emerald Fennell’s polarizing film and what gets cut or doubled down in adaptations. The panel traces race, class, narrative framing, eroticism, and memorable screen versions from Olivier to Andrea Arnold. They also riff on Kate Bush, pandemic resonance, and imagining modern casting.
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Shock Elements Clashed With Conventional Period Drama
- Naomi Fry sees Fennell’s choices as inconsistent: provocative shocks inserted into an otherwise conventional, bland period drama.
- Fry criticizes casting Margot Robbie as an unblemished, too-old Cathy amid sporadic bursts of kinky contemporary elements.
Making The Affair Ordinary Reduces the Stakes
- The film's sex scenes feel uncharged because they turn Wuthering Heights into a conventional adultery story, lowering the novel's original stakes.
- Alexandra Schwartz says making the affair ordinary diminishes the novel's radical emotional intensity and chemistry.
The Film Is A Traumatized Narrator's Version Of The Book
- Vinson Cunningham argues Fennell treats the film as a psychological portrait filtered through a traumatized narrator who cherry-picks the book's elements.
- He reads the movie as a young woman's idiosyncratic fantasy, explaining casting and amplified childhood trauma scenes.
