Emerald Fennell doesn’t do happy endings. Promising Young Woman (2020) ended with protagonist’s death. Saltburn (2023) ended with naked villain dancing on grave. Wuthering Heights (2026) ends with Margot Robbie’s Catherine and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff dead, their love unconsummated in life, their ghosts perhaps united in death—if you believe in ghosts. Fennell doesn’t confirm. She implies.
The Setup: Obsession on the Moors
Robbie plays Catherine Earnshaw, not as gothic ingénue but as feral force—wild-haired, mud-smeared, sexually awakened. Elordi’s Heathcliff is 6’5″ of brooding intensity, “Literally Me” meme made flesh. Their childhood bond—Catherine teaching Heathcliff to read, Heathcliff protecting Catherine from her brother’s abuse—becomes adult obsession. They cannot live together. Cannot live apart.
Fennell updates Brontë’s 1847 novel without modernizing it. The class dynamics remain brutal: Heathcliff is “dark-skinned” foundling (Jacob Elordi with spray tan, controversially), Catherine chooses Edgar Linton (white, wealthy, respectable) for security, then destroys herself with longing for Heathcliff.
The Middle: Two Marriages, Two Miseries
Catherine marries Edgar. Heathcliff marries Edgar’s sister Isabella, tortures her, becomes wealthy through mysterious means (possibly colonial exploitation—Fennell implies, doesn’t specify). Catherine gives birth to daughter Cathy, dies in childbirth after 12-hour labor sequence filmed in real-time. Robbie’s performance—screaming, hallucinating, begging for Heathcliff—reportedly required medical consultant on set.
Heathcliff’s reaction: digging up Catherine’s corpse one year after burial, embracing her decaying body, being bitten by her ghost (or madness). Elordi performed this sequence with 30-pound prosthetic corpse, 4-hour makeup application, in actual Yorkshire rain.
The Ending: Generational Curse
The film’s second half follows younger Cathy (played by different actress, not Robbie) and Heathcliff’s son Linton. Heathcliff, now tyrant of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, forces their marriage to secure property. He succeeds. He dies—starving himself, haunted by Catherine’s ghost, found with window open to moors.
The final sequence: Cathy’s ghost (Robbie, digitally de-aged or similar actress) and Heathcliff’s ghost (Elordi) walking moors together, hand in hand. Or is it younger Catherine and Heathcliff, before destruction? Fennell cuts between timelines—childhood innocence, adult passion, ghostly union. The ambiguity is deliberate.
The Interpretation: Love as Destruction
Fennell told Entertainment Weekly: “This isn’t romance. This is addiction.” Catherine and Heathcliff don’t build anything together. They destroy—each other, their families, themselves. The film’s final shot: two graves, weathered, side by side, with third space between them (for Edgar, eventually). The moors reclaim all.
The 65% Rotten Tomatoes score reflects this divisiveness—some critics find Fennell’s “steamy” additions exploitative, others necessary for modern audiences. The $82 million worldwide opening suggests audiences embrace the darkness. The B CinemaScore suggests they don’t know what to feel after.
The Legacy: Brontë’s Radicalism Restored
Brontë’s novel was condemned as “coarse” and “immoral” in 1847. Fennell’s version restores that shock—Catherine’s sexual agency, Heathcliff’s racial othering, the class warfare, the necrophiliac longing. The ending isn’t tragic in Shakespearean sense (noble flaw). It’s pathetic—two people who couldn’t grow up, destroying everything for adolescent passion.
Robbie and Elordi’s chemistry generates the film’s power. Their age gap (Robbie 34, Elordi 27) reverses Hollywood norms; her world-weariness versus his explosive youth creates imbalance that fuels obsession. They reportedly dated briefly during filming, adding meta-textual frisson.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights ends as it must: with death, with ghosts, with the moors indifferent to human passion. The only love that lasts is the one that kills.
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