Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of "Wuthering Heights"
2026 · Emerald Fennell · "Wuthering Heights" on Sightlines
It begins with a hanging. Before the moor and before the lovers, before any of the Brontë people bought Valentine's-weekend tickets for, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights shows you a rope. JoBlo's Chris Bumbray singled out how it was staged. It's a strange way into a romance, and it's the right one, because it tells you at once how the film means to work. It will seduce you and it will shock you, and it won't always let you tell which is happening.
Keep that opening in mind, along with a floor. In one room of the Lintons' house, production designer Suzie Davies laid down bright red acrylic. No eighteenth-century house had a floor like that, and nobody is meant to think one did. The design brief, in the production's own words, was the book as a fourteen-year-old imagines it on a first reading. So Cathy gets forty-five to fifty costumes from Jacqueline Durran, cut from mood boards that mix Tudor, the 1950s, Mugler and McQueen. One of them is a red dress that recalls Vivien Leigh's in Gone with the Wind, made of a synthetic so shiny it looks wet.
The film's critics have a fair complaint here. Hannah Strong in Little White Lies called the Grange the Overlook Hotel decorated by Simone Rocha and said the gowns feel cut off from the drama. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on what cinema can do, gives us a useful way to answer her, and also a way to see exactly where she's right.
Deleuze describes what he calls the color-image. Usually color in a film just tells you about things: the dress is red. Sometimes, though, a color stops describing an object and starts holding the feeling of the whole scene, soaking it up the way a sponge does. When that happens, the red stops being a property of the floor. It is the feeling. For Deleuze this belongs to a wider family of images that hold an emotion before it turns into action, and that's the most generous way into Fennell's design. The surfaces don't decorate the story, because the feeling lives in them. A teenager reading Brontë doesn't picture accurate wainscoting. She pictures how it feels, and here that feeling is red, glossy and slightly too much.
This lens explains the excess. It also shows the cost. A feeling held in a surface has to discharge somewhere eventually, and when the gowns seem to float free of the scenes, the color has absorbed the feeling without anything happening to it. That's Strong's point, put in Deleuze's terms. The film is daring you to decide which it is.
The weather does similar work. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren says he lit as naturalistically as he could and then layered an unrealistic amount of dramatic light on top. He used weather to carry each scene's emotion, and he names German Expressionism among his sources. Deleuze's account of expressionism fits closely: light and shadow as a graded scale, and things given a life that isn't quite organic, as if storms had moods. On this moor the sky isn't a backdrop. It feels.
Then there are the two houses. Fennell has described Thrushcross Grange as a space that tries to constrain nature. Every serious screen version has organized itself around this split between wild and cultivated, but Deleuze lets us say something sharper about it. In his writing on naturalism, mainly Stroheim and Luis Buñuel, a real social setting turns out to be the thin crust over what he calls an originary world, a primal territory of hunger and drives that the drawing room can't hold down. Edgar Linton's new-money fabrics, which Durran chose as nothing a Victorian gentleman would wear, are that crust. Heathcliff in his white shirts and long black coat, dressed in an older Georgian register, comes from underneath it.
The production carried out this split physically. More than forty of its fifty shooting days were on stage at Elstree, where both houses were built inside and out. Real Yorkshire, Todmorden and the Dales, was used mainly for landscape. The houses are fabrications. The moor is the one thing that wasn't built. For those wide shots Fennell and Sandgren used VistaVision, the large-negative format, on Kodak stock, with small figures inside vast frames, because the finer grain holds up when your eye settles on one corner of the image. And it's a nice piece of lineage that Buñuel, Deleuze's model naturalist, adapted this same novel himself in Abismos de Pasión (1954), dragging it into Mexican surrealist melodrama. That film is the precedent that licenses Fennell's liberties.
She works in tableaux. Deleuze contrasts cinema's modern discovery, the ordinary instant caught mid-motion, with the older privileged instant: the pose, the decisive composed moment. Fennell picks the pose almost every time. There she follows William Wyler's 1939 version, where Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography turned the moors into painted compositions, and the Romantic painters Sandgren cites. Against that sits Andrea Arnold's 2011 film, handheld and weather-beaten, which also took seriously the novel's coding of Heathcliff as racially other. Fennell's casting of Jacob Elordi was criticized on exactly that ground, and her glossy version defines itself against Arnold's.
The set pieces belong to a different tradition. Victoria Boydell, who has cut all three of Fennell's features, builds music-driven sequences that tip romance into transgression, set to Charli XCX's original songs and to Anthony Willis's felted, prepared-piano score. Deleuze has a term from Eisenstein's "montage of attractions" that suits this: the attraction-image, staging built to strike you as a figure rather than to move a plot along. It's the method of Promising Young Woman, where beauty is bait aimed at the viewer, crossed with Marie Antoinette, where a pop cue makes a period interior feel like present-tense adolescent hunger.
None of this leaves the main regime Deleuze called the movement-image, a cinema of people who want things and act on what they want. What Fennell changes is the shape of the story. She drops the novel's whole second generation, the long aftermath, keeping what she found exciting and subversive. The book is a chronicle of consequences. The film holds the passion and refuses the aftermath.
It's too early to say what this does to film as an art. Critics split almost exactly in half, and the box office ran to $241.7 million. But the film does make a real argument: an adaptation can adapt a reader's memory of a book rather than the book itself, and in 2026 a major studio can still shoot that on celluloid, at the scale of the moor. So watch it again for the floors and the weather. When the red fills the frame, ask whether it's carrying the feeling or covering for its absence. The film wants you to stay unsure.
Concepts in play
- affective colour — The bright red acrylic floor in the Lintons' house and Cathy's ultra-shiny red synthetic dress (echoing Vivien Leigh's in Gone with the Wind); design conceived as a fourteen-year-old's first reading rather than historical accuracy
- expressionism — Sandgren cites German Expressionism; naturalistic lighting with an unrealistic amount of dramatic light layered on, and weather deployed to carry each scene's emotion
- originary-world — Fennell describes Thrushcross Grange as a space that tries to constrain nature; new-money Linton fabrics vs Heathcliff's Georgian register; stage-built houses vs the location-shot VistaVision moor
- privileged-instants — Fennell and Sandgren's tableau-conscious house style; Romantic-painter and Wyler/Toland painterly-tableau lineage; VistaVision wide compositions with small figures, framed for the eye to settle in
- attraction-image — Boydell's music-driven set pieces that tip romance into transgression, scored with Charli XCX songs; the staged hanging cold open as seduction braided with shock
- the movement-image — A desire-driven romantic melodrama of acting characters; the excision of the novel's second half concentrates the Cathy–Heathcliff passion rather than suspending action