Wuthering Heights: Catherine Earnshaw and The Fluency of Confinement

Film: Wuthering Heights

Language: English

Year: 2026

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Margot Robbie (Catherine Earnshaw), Jacob Elordi (Heathcliff), Hong Chau (Nelly Dean), Alison Oliver (Isabella Linton), Shazad Latif (Edgar Linton), Owen Cooper (Young Heathcliff)

Genre: Drama / Romance / Period Adaptation

Runtime: 130 minutes

Release: Theatrical (February 13, 2026)

Catherine Earnshaw isn’t destroyed in this adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’. She is trained. In the movie, no tyrant looms over Catherine. What unsettles instead is a woman undone not by force, but by fluency. Unlike readings that frame Catherine as torn between wild instinct and social order, this adaptation presents her as conversant in both.

The key image arrives early and it is almost too plain to argue with. Nelly tightens Catherine’s corset. Even when Nelly warns she will not be able to breathe, Catherine repeats the instruction as compliance presented as a decision. The body must take a certain shape to survive within a certain world. She requests the shaping.

From there, power operates through management rather than force. Nelly is central to this. She saves, betrays, protects and withholds. Yet none of this is framed as moustache-twirling villainy or Gothic antagonism. It is the everyday management of what can be known and what must remain unsaid. Nelly’s power is not in status, but in routing information as gentle control.

Colour is not used as a simple mood ring. The palette engineers emotions. Desire becomes design. Red embeds, it transfers and scars like a blood mark against white. If red marks volatility, gentle pastels mark aggressive dilution. When desire cannot exist in the body, it is presented as mediated experience through windowpanes. The windowpanes allow observation but deny oxygen. Blue arrives as borrowed warmth or transferable property and not as freedom. Green is containment disguised as order. Each metallic moment marks Catherine styled, arranged and sealed. Black absorbs what remains.

Repetition reveals training. The egg prank occurs once as a playful impulse and again as a message, the second time noticeably dulled. The storm dialogue repeats with reversed speakers, less romantic echo than emotional recalibration. Experience has intervened. Desire the second time, learns to anticipate judgment.

Instinct is mapped, not erased. In the sequence of dog imagery, desire awakens, then erupts, then becomes submissive. The film suggests that survival does not mean endurance. It means learning the correct posture.

And Catherine is the most perceptive of all. She protects Heathcliff in the storm. She tries to manage the scandal before it erupts. She moderates physical escalation. She anticipates consequences. This is not a girl swept away by passion. Her tragedy does not stem from ignorance. It stems from alignment. And in this world, alignment is fatal.

By the time she is confined to bed, colour draining from her body, having stated plainly that she has lost her child, there is no visible authority present. No husband instructing her to remain still. No servant restraining her. No lover is exerting influence. She is alone.

In a moment so brief it risks invisibility, a hand emerges from beneath the bed and grips her ankle, returning her to sitting. The camera doesn’t underline it. The correction simply occurs.

Catherine survives by learning the shape of her enclosure so thoroughly that she can no longer imagine standing outside it. The most chilling detail in this adaptation isn’t the hand itself. It is the absence of reaction. Discipline no longer requires supervision once absorbed. What began as a request for tightening ends as an automatic correction. The tragedy isn’t confinement, but that confinement feels correct.

Darshim Saxena writes on cinema and culture