Atlanta experts don’t shred ‘bodice-ripping’ version of ‘Wuthering Heights’

The Warner Bros. release garnered 2026’s biggest opening weekend, with $34.8 million in ticket sales in its first three days in North American theaters, grossing more than $167 million worldwide.

“Wuthering Heights” has brought enthusiastic audiences back to the theater in the age of streaming and shown the return, some critics have noted, of the genre of the epic Hollywood romance. And polling has estimated 76% of the audience for the film are women. As with the more than $1 billion grossing “Barbie” in 2023, “Wuthering Heights” suggests women — and female directors — can make bank.

Credit: (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Credit: (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

We polled regional academics, film critics and authors for their take on the film and got some expectedly divided opinions on whether Fennell’s adaptation was a table-toppling disruption of Brontë’s novel or a thrilling work of art in its own right.

Crescent Rainwater, a professor of English and liberal arts at Mercer University, pointed out the novel faced the same sort of critical rancor on its release. “People were very confused by this novel because it didn’t fit the expectations of the sort of literature of the period.”

Fennell’s hypersexual retelling, including some sadomasochistic tropes worked into the action, has been dubbed, variously “50 Shades of Brontë,” and its star Margot Robbie derided as a “Brontë Barbie.”

And although female filmgoers have, in the history of cinema, been asked to consistently identify with male heroes and protagonists, male audiences can sometimes seem less enthusiastic about looking at the world through the eyes of a female director or character.

“There’s such a fear of female sexuality and female pleasure in the culture right now that we’re having this kind of conservative pushback on that, and I think this film deals with that in a very frank, powerful way,” said Crystal O’Leary-Davidson, an author and professor of Gothic literature and film at Middle Georgia State University. She saw the film with her husband, horror novelist Andy Davidson, “and both of us just loved it,” she said, and appreciated Fennell’s unique, over-the-top sensibility.

“As a film fan and a film scholar, I really try to appreciate a movie not as an imitation of the book or a lesser form of the book, but as its own art form. And for me, the film was such a delight in terms of its art design, its costuming, the sets. It has such a theatrical quality to it,” O’Leary-Davidson said.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

Some of the critical backlash to Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” feels linked to how directly it addresses a female audience, and how passionately the film has been embraced by women, who often attend the film in groups or drag husbands and boyfriends to see the film.

“The dismissal of the quality of literature, because it is presumably for women — that is still very much a present tense thing,” said Thomas Bullington, an expert on Gothic literature at Mercer University. “And so I think that’s certainly playing into the dynamic that you’re seeing here, writ large.”

Bullington was not, however, carried away by Fennell’s interpretation of the novel. “When you look at Gothic classics, you’re getting a much more nuanced and layered exploration of cruelty and evil.” But he said this film version dispenses with such nuance and “turns it into a bodice ripper.”

Although Fennell undeniably strays from the intense, almost familial “soul mate” devotion between Catherine and Heathcliff in Brontë’s novel, transforming it into a “Gone With the Wind”-level romance, many Atlanta-area experts on the novel agree Fennell has retained the novel’s uneasiness and heightened emotions.

Credit: Millie Turner/Invision/AP

Credit: Millie Turner/Invision/AP

Heide Crawford, who focuses on Gothic horror literature at the University of Georgia, is a fan of Brontë’s book as a supernatural-laden pillar of Gothic literature. “She creates an unsettling atmosphere that captivates us,” Crawford said of the novel. She describes Fennell’s interpretation as having the quality of “fan fiction,” despite her appreciation for how the film’s cinematography, set design, costuming and Charli xcx’s atmospheric soundtrack capture some of the spirit of the Gothic, she said.

Mary Kay McBrayer, an Atlanta Film Critics Circle member and author of historical nonfiction, was initially skeptical but surprised by how much she enjoyed Fennell’s film version. “I know it wasn’t always historically accurate, but you don’t really want that in a fantasy,” she said.

Much as audiences surrendered to the delightful historical inaccuracy, bizarre costumes, characters and behavior in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 fantasy “Poor Things,” McBrayer recommends surrendering to Fennell’s feverish teenage fantasy. “It very much … has the vibe of teenage love to me, where it’s like, ‘I can’t stand him,’ and ‘I also am obsessed with him,’ which is not really how adults look at love most of the time.”

Like O’Leary-Davidson, SCAD illustration professor Amy Lennertz was surprised that so much ink has been spilled describing how far Fennell diverged from the novel. That kind of rancor that wasn’t present, she noted, when Francis Ford Coppola created his equally stylized, personal vision of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in 1992. “As an artist, she’s allowed to do whatever she wants to do with the movie. She doesn’t have to do a straight adaptation,” Lennertz said.

Every film adapted from a novel, after all, is an interpretation. And film storytelling with its multiplicity of voices — director, screenwriter, actors, costume and set design — is a very different enterprise than the single creative voice of a writer.

“I think the major thing is, everyone is allowed to have their opinion on the movie. And that’s what makes art so beautiful, is you can hate it and you can love it. I don’t think anyone’s wrong when it comes to their reaction to the movie,” Lennertz said.