“Wuthering Heights” and ‘The Bride!’ Have The Same Problem

Gothic cinema was never dead, but new life was certainly breathed into the genre in recent years. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things in January 2024 marked the revival of neo-gothic film, combining classic gothic tropes with feminist critique and modern anxieties around agency, sexuality, and desire. The resurgence continued with an influx of gothic stories such as Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu in December that same year, Oscar-nominated Sinners in April 2025, Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale in July, and Guillermo del Toro’s  Frankenstein in October. 

In 2026, this evolution of the modern gothic wave continued with two high-profile films and their adaptations of classic gothic fiction, “Wuthering Heights” and The Bride!. In theory, their source materials—long regarded as one of literature’s most powerful tales of revenge, agency, and generational trauma—are ripe for a modern reinvention. 

So, imagine my disappointment when I walked out of both films, going, “WTF did I just watch?” The gothic genre has never been one to hold back, and perhaps this is where these films’ greatest tragedy lies. Whether it’s doomed romance, moral decay, or tragic deaths, there is a type of heightened emotion that ravages you in a confronting way. 

“Wuthering Heights” and The Bride! failed to conjure any of those rapturous emotions despite their stylistic flair. No. On the contrary, what Emerald Fennell and Maggie Gyllenhaal have done with “Wuthering Heights” and The Bride!, respectively, is emblematic of a broader problem plaguing cinematic storytelling right now. 

CARDBOARD CHARACTERS

A movie, no matter how visually striking or technologically remarkable it is, is only as good as its characters. Without them, you’re just looking at stylised moving pictures; a glossy, plastic project with no depth. And while autuer directors do exist, it’s the balance of artistic control and character depth that turns a great movie into a timeless piece remembered in the cinematic canon. Unfortunately for “Wuthering Heights” and The Bride!, both films suffer from cardboard character cutouts whose interiority and emotional complexity are hollowed out. 

Perhaps it was my mistake for giving Fennell the benefit of the doubt when she shared her adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” would be based on what her 14-year-old mind could recall from Emily Brontë’s acclaimed novel. After all, I’ve read fanfiction from authors at that age who proved that writing and imagination can be good. Alas, it became painfully clear that Fennell only wanted to explore the horniness of a suppressed couple in the moors.

The casting of Australian white actor Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff was the first glaring red flag. By removing Heathcliff’s otherness and the racial abuse he’s suffered that turned him into a violent and cruel man, Fennell’s version of Heathcliff flattens the character into a bodice-ripping hottie with a broken heart. A romantic lead to sympathise rather than disdain for his propensity for cruelty and suffocating obsession. 

Margot Robbie’s Catherine is also a total miscast, and I’m not saying this because of her age. In “Wuthering Heights”, there is no doubt that Robbie is beautiful, but she simply does not convince me as a 19th-century woman, ruined by forbidden desire and devotion. Like Heathcliff, Fennell does not bother to expand on Cathy beyond her carnality, rarely exploring her inner life with the depth that it deserves. 

The final nail in the coffin of a series of lazy and uncaring decisions was the changes to Isabella. While Alison Oliver commits to the performance, the decision to turn Isabella from a victim of marital rape to a sexual deviant who gets aroused by Heathcliff’s abuses completely takes away from his monstrous nature. Gothic tropes such as entrapment and psychological torture are replaced with a kinky S&M relationship. How callous and insulting.

This blatant refusal from Fennell to engage with any deeper meaning and interiority of her characters signals a period of anti-intellectualism that has become more rampant as of late. The idea that “it’s not that deep” and sometimes, it’s okay to watch two hot people make out and be done with it. It could’ve very well been the case if Fennell wrote an original story. 

But the decision to wear these well-known gothic characters like skinsuits to tell a smutty story is an egregious dishonour to one of the few 19th-century novels that actively explored topics such as class, sex, racism, marital abuse, and the all-consuming love between a coloured man and a white woman. These topics should not be removed; if anything, they demand discussion now more than ever. The day we become comfortable abandoning serious discourse for the sake of cheap thrills is the day we’ve truly lost the plot.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, the film ambitiously sets up Mary Shelley as a ghost stuck in a sort of purgatory in search of a woman to possess. She finds that in Ida, a prostitute who is working as a mole for an Italian mob in the 1930s. Shelley haunts the narrative, but her presence feels out of place, like a jump scare to remind audiences how angry she is without ever explaining why.

The most likely soon-to-be best actress Oscar winner, Jessie Buckley, is fully committed to the interpretation and is nothing short of miraculous as both the great novelist and soft-spoken victim, but is mostly let down by Gyllenhaal’s script. As much as she is a force of nature, most of The Bride’s character is a mouthpiece of schizophrenic screaming as she spews synonyms like a walking thesaurus with a British accent in tedious frequency. 

As for Ida, there’s not much you know about her apart from what other characters tell us about her. Her work as a mole for the police would’ve been interesting, but Gyllenhaal doesn’t grant us any flashbacks or montages that would’ve greatly developed Ida as a person rather than a Harley Quinn-esque caricature. 

Meanwhile, Christian Bale’s creature (who calls himself Frank) certainly looks the part, tattered and stapled all over, but lacks the emotional core to make us truly care for the lonesome being. He expounds on wanting a bride after years alone to the mad scientist Dr Euphronious, but this doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know from a fictional character that has been adapted countless times.

STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE

Gothic cinema does promise gripping visuals, sure, but it seemed as though Fennell and Gyllenhaal were more committed to capturing the beauty of gothic, and not attaching it to something meaningful. 

Fennell spends an exhaustive amount of time creating visuals designed to shock and sweep you off your feet. There are genuine moments where the gothic imagery shines, from Cathy’s billowing white veil across the moors or the ghost of a young Heathcliff appearing below her window. Fennell also creates a dreamy Alice in Wonderland-esque feel with her bold colour grading and opulent set designs, which is luscious to look at. But for the most part, these moments become increasingly decorative and self-serving.

Interestingly (and perhaps not surprisingly), it is Charli XCX’s original soundtrack album that does its best in capturing and conveying the vision of the film. Like a spectre, the score contributes to the aural and atmospheric beauty of “Wuthering Heights”, haunting the film with its hypnotic and harsh tones. It’s the only thing that reflects the darkness and bleakness of the novel, but even this cannot make up for the lack of substance that pervades the entire film. 

Ultimately, “Wuthering Heights” is a movie purely running on vibes rather than themes. Instead of focusing on how the visuals can complement the narrative, Fennell was thinking of how to get on every girl’s Pinterest board and maximise the leading pair’s hotness. If only Fennell had stuck to making a music video as Kate Bush did, she might’ve found better success, and we would all have been better for it.

Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal stays truer to traditional Gothic tones in The Bride. 360-degree shots of the city and the dimly-lit office to revive The Bride set the tone. The use of black and white, as well as play on shadows, showcases a balance of gothic aesthetic with modern sensibility. 

It’s like Gyllenhaal almost found a balance before the ghost of Frankenstein possessed her to stitch a chaotic hodgepodge of a film for herself. Like the emphatic exclamation point in the title, The Bride! is the definition of overkill (or what the Gen Zs would say, “doing too much”).

The film is a gothic melodrama, a detective noir, a love letter to cinema, a political thriller, a revenge story, and even a musical, because why not? The extended dance number with its dazzling choreography and heady score is fun to watch, but ultimately, it serves no purpose and is never brought up again.

It’s a movie that insists upon itself while not insisting on anything at all. As a result, The Bride! does not cohere as one whole film, and Gyllenhaal’s constant stylistic shifts fragment the Gothic atmosphere and mood. 

A LOVE STORY…?

Both films try to convince audiences of a sweeping love story between their leading pairs when, in actuality, “Wuthering Heights” and The Bride! could’ve benefited from going a totally different approach. 

Marketing for Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” dubbed the film as “inspired by the greatest love story of all time.” Immediately, no. I struggle to think how anyone, even a 14-year-old Fennell, could come to such a preposterous conclusion on Brontë’s novel about a man hell-bent on exacting revenge over a woman that it drove her to her death.

But look, if you’re going to strip away any sort of pathos from the novel to replace it with an erotic story of sexual awakening, you’d better deliver. As what Fennell and the film’s stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, had promised, I walked into the cinema expecting to feel at least hot and bothered. But no, I couldn’t even get that!   

Their one claim that “Wuthering Heights” would be a steamy romance was shockingly unsexy, despite how much the film tries to show you how hot Robbie and Elordi are together. Fennell wants to explore only the sexual endeavours between the two, but it just becomes tedious to watch. From fingering aspic and clutching flesh-coloured walls to playing with gooey egg yolks, the sex scenes lack passion and yearning, only serving crudeness that fails to wring out any romance that feels believable. 

In the novel, the incredible longing Cathy and Heathcliff feel for each other is made all the more powerful because it’s burdened by the weight of the world’s prejudices and expectations. By removing this, there are no real stakes to Cathy and Heathcliff getting together in the film. There is no love story here, just two people partaking in each other’s jealousy for the sake of it.

Similarly, in The Bride!, Shelley opens in her monologue that this is a “love story”, but it isn’t. The slow-burn romance between Ida and Frank is contradictory and at odds with the film’s overt feminist messaging. 

The lack of exploration on female autonomy in Bride of Frankenstein presented an opportune time for Gyllenhaal to dig deep. And the messaging of the film certainly advocated that women exercise their own agency, but this all comes apart when Ida falls in love with Frank. Despite his gaslighting that takes advantage of her amnesia and lies that they’ve always been married to keep her by his side, she claims she will “love him till the end of time” even after learning about his manipulative machinations. 

Gyllenhaal wants The Bride to be her own person, to go out on her own, and claim her power. But at the same time, she also wants her to be lovers with a man who has entrapped her in a life she did not consent to. But you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Gyllenhaal failed to develop either choice fully, leaving the love story and its feminist messaging muddled and confused. 

The feminist tone is once again diluted at the end as Shelley continues to control Ida in an unexplained way, undermining any real aspect of female agency over herself. Had Gyllenhaal focused more on the relationship between Ida and Shelley as two women fighting against the patriarchal system rather than a love story with Frank, we would have gotten something truly formidable. In the end, Ida’s journey doesn’t feel as triumphant as it should be, even as she claims the identity of The Bride. 

FINAL VERDICT

Despite my criticisms, I do commend Fennell and Gyllenhaal on undertaking something like this. The truth is, you don’t need faithfulness to the source material for an adaptation to be good. In fact, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will be a success. Where “Wuthering Heights” ultimately fails is her inability to replace the core themes and messaging in Brontë’s novel, which she stripped away with material that makes for a new, provocative, and unique interpretation.

Rather, Fennell did not care for the character’s interior and exterior lives, only wishing to “smuttify” a beloved literary classic in the hopes that audiences would be satisfied with watching two beautiful people get steamy in beautiful backdrops. 

With Gyllenhaal, the hallmarks of a great film are there. Despite its shifting tones and confusing messaging, the film makes up for it with its stellar cast performance, punchy editing, and costume design. It’s a shame that Gyllenhaal wasn’t able to excavate a coherent theme and spark more life into this audacious project.

Final ratings: “Wuthering Heights” (4/10), The Bride! (6.5/10)

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