I had written for the Italian film monthly Best Movie about Emerald Fennell’s two previous efforts as writer-director: Promising Young Woman with Carey Mulligan in May 2021 and Saltburn in December 2023.

Click here to read English translation of Emerald Fennell on Saltburn.

I enjoyed this young British woman’s take-no-prisoners approach to filmmaking, so I was looking forward to her movie version of Wuthering Heights from the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, and I was not disappointed.

Margot Robbie, who produced Fennell’s first two movies and this one, plays Cathy. Jacob Elordi, who starred in Saltburn, is Heathcliff. Alison Oliver, who played Venetia, Felix sister in Saltburn, is Isabella. Hong Chau is Nelly. Owen Cooper of Adolescence is young Heathcliff.

I had seen them before, but I rewatched on streaming the 1939 Wuthering Heights directed by William Wyler (shot in Black and White by cinematographer Gregg Toland) starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, with David Niven as Edgar and Geraldine Fitzgerald as Isabelle, his sister.

And the 1992 version Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by Peter Kosminsky with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. I wondered who the young woman in a cloak narrating the story was and realized it was Emily Brontë played by Sinead O’Connor. While in the novel the narrator is Nelly, played here by Janet McTeer.

I saw recently so did not rewatch Emily (2022), where Emma Mackey, star of Ella McCay (2025) by James L. Brooks, plays the novelist and poet, the middle Brontë sister.

I did not read the novel, that is in one of my many bookshelves, but I put it on my nightstand with the pile of books to read.

I also have Jane Eyre, the 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë, the older sister, and the DVD of the 2011 movie Jane Eyre by Cary Joji Fukunaga with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender.

I researched the life and works of these three sisters, including youngest sister Anne Brontë, who wrote two novels: Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Charlotte wrote three more: Shirley, Villette. a reworking of her first novel The Professor.

Some years ago I had seen Devotion (1946) with Olivia De Havilland as Charlotte Brontë and Ida Lupino as Emily, but don’t quite remember it. I might rewatch it.

The Brontë family was unusual for the 1800s in that the five daughters, and not just the one son Bronwell, were sent to boarding school or educated at home.

Their novels are hiding a feminist subtext, as explored in the 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, about the works of Victorian writers: Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson.

You may watch the trailer if you don’t mind spoilers, however I suggest you experience this new Wuthering Heights version, bursting with colors, extravagant costumes and sets, not to mention passionate sex scenes (not included in the novel or previous versions), in the darkness of a movie theatre by immersing yourself inside a huge screen in the company of others.