Don’t betray your own heart: why the world needs grand love stories like “Wuthering Heights”
From Greek tragedy to Emily Brontë, epic romances are part of the human condition – and when imagined as films, we crave them again and again
We need grand love stories.
Most films contain some sort of romantic subplot. For some it’s the main plot. But that doesn’t make them a grand love story.
A grand love story is a romance that heightens the emotions of life to vivid, huge, almost unbearable extremes. It shows people loving too hard, too fast. It shows incredible joy, and, yes, incredible heartache. It lets us experience feelings that we try to avoid in our daily lives, even our own relationships.
As a glorious big-screen reimagining of “Wuthering Heights” opens in cinemas, it’s worth remembering why we fall so hard for grand love stories.
When I was 16, in 1997, I marked Valentine’s Day by doing the single most romantic thing that seemed possible for a teenager to do: I went on a date to my local cinema to see the film Titanic. Needless to say, everyone in the Odeon New Street Birmingham knew they were going to cry at some point: it was just a question of when.
Such was the power of that film that, during another viewing, a friend started to cry at the mere sight of the passengers boarding the ship at the start. By the time Leonardo DiCaprio met his icy death, my friend was practically catatonic – and this to a generation that had only just recovered from Leo’s death in Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann’s thrilling 1996 joyride through Shakespeare’s immortal romantic tragedy.
The thing about grand love stories is that they’re timeless, dotted over the millennia: we’re not just talking Shakespeare here, we’re talking Orpheus and Eurydice, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere. They’re part of the human condition.
Since the birth of cinema, the medium has been underpinned by epic romances. It’s a form that at its peak can marshal the sort of overwhelming onslaught of sound, vision and sheer feeling that actually does the great love stories full justice. Think Gone with the Wind (1939), think Casablanca (1942), think West Side Story (1961), think Doctor Zhivago (1965), think Brokeback Mountain (2005), think Moonlight (2016): huge, overwhelming, generationally defining, visually sumptuous, emotionally seismic works of art.
Spoiler alert: most of these stories end pretty badly, or at the very least without the main couple happily riding off into the sunset. But for all their extremity, they speak to a truth we all recognise about love: that it’s complicated. We know this. And if hopefully none of us will flame out as hard as Juliet and her Romeo, then we’ve all experienced some romantic darkness. A story about love’s dizzying highs and sickening lows is more meaningful than one about a perfect couple having a wonderful time. Love and heartache go hand in hand for all of us.
One of the grandest, albeit toxic, love stories is Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece about doomed lust on the wild Yorkshire moors. It’s both a timeless novel and a story that’s found its place with different generations via a string of iconic interpretations: the sombre 1939 film reflected the unease of a world sliding into war; then Kate Bush’s startling debut single crystalised its essence into a few ethereal minutes; Emma Rice’s 2020 National Theatre adaptation went all in on the otherworldly strangeness of its world of yearning ghosts and ranging storms. Lovers Heathcliff and Cathy are a heady mix of fantasy and nightmare: arguably unsuited to each other, but bound by a love so ferocious we can only look on in horrified awe.
But has there been an adaptation that’s really fully embraced its melodrama, really gone for it as a Titanic-scale romance? Certainly not for a while, at least: recent screen adaptations have taken a dour, naturalist approach.
Until now. Just in time for Valentine’s Day 2026 comes the much-talked-about reimagining from the acclaimed British director Emerald Fennell, a “Wuthering Heights” that looks set to be a full-blown romantic event. So many stops have been pulled out that we’re still not entirely sure exactly what to expect from the finished film. But what is abundantly clear is it’s going to be a lot. From the official poster that references Gone with the Wind, to the gothy grandeur of its Charli xcx soundtrack, the sumptuously broody trailer visual and of course the A-list casting – Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi – this is Wuthering Heights writ large, in blood red.
“It’s this love story that hits you so deeply,” says Robbie, “and I think it’s just been a really long time since we’ve had this kind of love story on screen, one that makes you feel so much. I think the main thing people are going to say is like, ‘I haven’t felt like this in so long,’ which is exciting.”
Fennell says she wanted to capture the way Brontë’s novel “destabilises” the reader. “The cinema is a place to connect, and we’re giving audiences a way to feel something, to unleash any emotions they’ve been stifling. To reclaim romance,” she says. “I hope when people see the film – whether they know the book or not – they feel destabilised, disoriented. I hope it gets under their skin in the very best way and that they leave the cinema feeling electrified.”
It feels like an event already – the more so because the true grand cinematic love story is actually relatively rare. If they’re so good, why don’t we get more of them? Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the most successful film ever made. Titanic and Doctor Zhivago are in the top 10.
Why doesn’t Hollywood produce more romances? You need the right stars, with the right chemistry. You can’t just churn grand love stories out to a formula: they have to mean something deep to their audience, and to the makers as well. They’re rich and heavy: we can only consume so much. But when one hits the spot, we crave it again and again.
Most directors only make one grand love story in the classic sense: they pour so much into the film when they do that it’s no wonder they don’t feel they can go back. Fennell has worked her way up via her previous directorial hits Promising Young Woman and Saltburn – plus many other credits as writer and actor – and her vision of this grand love story deserves the grand cinematic experience of a big screen. If Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” lives up to its potential, then Valentine’s Day won’t be complete without it.
“Wuthering Heights” in cinemas 13 February. Book your tickets now