“Wuthering Heights” and What’s Making Us Happy

February 13, 2026·27 min·2 clips

Barry argues Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights fails to show Heathcliff's humanity beyond teenage obsession.

Those quotation marks are doing some work. The conversation treats Fennell's Wuthering Heights less like a classic adaptation and more like a deliberately overheated object. Margot Robbie plays Kathy. Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff. Their moors-bound love gets framed as passionate, doomed, and powered by physical charge. The movie sounds pretty bonkers, in a way the panel clearly enjoys chewing on. One critic sees Fennell as a stylist trying to turn the feeling of first reading the book into something bodily. That gives the movie its best defense. Judged as sensation instead of argument, the feverish choices make more sense. Then the doubts arrive. Another panelist can buy the style on those terms and still feel the movie needs stronger ideas underneath. Saltburn hangs over that split: pleasure in the look, impatience with the surface. The adolescent references do a lot of work too. Maul Flanders on PBS, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Andrew Keegan, and Flowers in the Attic become shorthand for the movie's taboo, teen-brain frequency. The joke lands, but it is also criticism. The film may hit a certain thirteen-year-old self while the adult critic keeps pushing back. Rage is what feels undercooked. The panel wants the hatred and longing to hit as hard as the visual atmosphere. Nobody sounds ready to write it off. The fun is hearing critics argue into, around, and partly out of their first reactions. The tail segment moves into recommendations, including Scott Meslow's A Place Both Wonderful and Strange through Lost, Westworld, and Severance.

As heard by us

A sharp, civil argument about style, fidelity, and whether this Wuthering Heights lands.

NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour treats Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights as a meeting point between style and idea, and that tension gives the conversation its charge.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a smart take on Emerald Fennell's pretty bonkers Wuthering Heights, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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