“Wuthering Heights” is all over the radio lately. Dear is the song and the activities that its cult following spawned (read: The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever), but it’s funny how Hollywood sneezes and the rest of the media gets itchy nostrils.

Due to premier in 2026, the new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights stars A-listers Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff. This annoyingly pretty pair will enter the kingdom of culture inspired by Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel—a kingdom that is undeniably and irrevocably ruled by singer-songwriter Kate Bush.

Kate wrote “Wuthering Heights” at 18 after watching a BBC adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, a Victorian classic and an enduring story of dark, doomed romance. The track hard launched her musical career: It was the first song written and performed by a woman to reach #1 in the UK charts, and afterwards Bush became one of the first women to write and produce her own album. She was a pioneering technologist who shaped the way digital synthesizers were used in popular music, and was the first performer to fashion a wireless headset microphone. She made it using a coathanger.

Opinions vary as to how well Kate’s song captures the original story. I’m not sure this is a debate worth having, since we’re squaring 400-odd pages with four and a half minutes, but either way, both the song and the novel are brave and dramatic. They respond to questions about truth and convention, dramatizing the tension between societal constraints and personal desire—a tension that both Brontë and Bush have lived with as female artists. They give us ways to think about where art comes from, and who gets to tell it.

The story is due a modern cinematic take, and it’s a very different endeavour from making a song; greater in scope, budget and, arguably, responsibility. But who is Emerald Fennel? And what’s she going to do to Wuthering Heights?

Adapting the novel for film has historically been a challenge. It spans two generations and has a complex structure. You don’t get any direct accounts from Cathy’s perspective even though she’s the main female character: she’s constructed entirely through other characters’ accounts of her, and she dies in the first half of the novel.

The 1939 adaptation is the most successful to date (it received eight Academy Award nominations and won the Best Cinematography category), but it only adapted half the story. Fennel will do the same, but, if reports of an “aggressively provocative” screen test are anything to go by, this movie is going to be something else entirely.

According to reports about the test screening, the movie is what you’d expect from Fennel, who’s known for a stylized kind of debauchery famously exhibited by the bathwater-slurping scene in Saltburn (2023). Her Wuthering Heights reportedly opens with a public hanging in which the hanged man “ejaculates mid-execution” and a nun fondles his body’s visible erection. Neither of these things happen in the novel, which is wholly Victorian in its lack of sex and erections.

Cathy isn’t exactly sexy, either. She’s barely a teenager and is emotionally unstable and obsessive. She oscillates between intense passion and mental derangement so fast you can’t tell which is which. There is violence and psychological abuse. Fennel has said, “[the movie] needed somebody like Margot… somebody who has power, an otherworldly power, a godlike power, that means people lose their minds.” Given it is Cathy who loses her mind in the plot, I’m curious to see how this plays out. Robbie is surely capable of such an intense performance, but there’s no sense of it in the trailer. Mainly she is gasping and blushing.

The making of this movie is of course a spectacle in itself. The trailer betrays just how vibes-based and salacious it’s going to be; literature students are already up in arms about it. But that’s the whole point. Where other directors might handle this material the way you’d handle an heirloom, Fennel is apparently going to blow it to slutty smithereens. And that’s fine! There’s an appetite for it. Charli XCX is doing the soundtrack. It might even be a good watch. Wind us through a show-reel of yearning and fingers in mouths, saturate it, make it aesthetic, release it on Valentine’s Day. Feed the machine, why not. It’s a lavish addition to the Wuthering Heights canon, but not an unexpected one.

That said, I feel disappointed in this film already—a feeling that’s amplified by its proximity to Kate Bush. She is a culturally important artist, and many have written about why. The magnitude of her influence and artistic integrity is astonishing, and her audio-visual atmospheres are ethereal in ways that make you wonder what kind of mad feminine energy source she’s tapped into. It’s all a generous overflow of her inner world; she is art pop’s Queen of Cups. Fennel is similarly bold in her vision, but less original. She is exceedingly posh, she has taste, and she is clearly an excellent marketeer. She understands the zeitgeist, she knows a good font. At the same time, she keeps us banging our heads against the fishbowl of a culture where marketing and celebritism matter more than provenance or originality.

Yes, it’s a sign of the times. It was easier to do something new in 1978 than it is in 2025. But Kate Bush will always be a reminder that eccentric and unexpected art can break into the mainstream. Faced with Hollywood’s “Wuthering Heights,” we should all be more Kate Bush.