In Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, the moors of Yorkshire are wet with rain, fog, and symbolism. The rugged landscape separating the titular home from the neighboring estate, Thrushcross Grange, represents danger and harshness, but also a kind of wild freedom for the star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, who explore the land together in childhood and spend their adult lives yearning for each other.
In Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film “Wuthering Heights,” the walls are literally dripping with moisture of all kinds. Every frame onscreen, every room erected at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, near London, is over-the-top, filled with surrealist nods to the themes at hand (and also, literally, so many hands). These bold design choices are imbued with meaning—nothing about Fennell’s take is subtle. “You can never really have enough with Emerald, and that’s the joy of working with a director like that,” production designer Suzie Davies tells AD. “She has such a strong style.”
While Brontë’s book is primarily set in the late 18th century, painstakingly recreating Georgian architectural details was not at the top of the to-do list for Davies and her team, including set decorator Charlotte Dirickx. (The pair also worked on Saltburn together.) “We were aiming for an accuracy of feeling rather than period,” explains Davies. “All the design and the vision of it had to be felt before it was understood. We were playing into every sensation. We often spoke about how it’d be great if we could have Smell-O-Vision. It’d be lovely to give the audience bits of the walls that you can touch.”
Many literature lovers and fans of the book are already grumbling on Reddit about every aspect of this film, which hits theaters February 13: from the casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff (these critiques are valid) to the plot (please note the quotation marks around the film’s title!) to the similarly anachronistic costumes. This is not your mother’s—or even the BBC’s—Wuthering Heights. There’s a fan-fiction-like quality to it, right down to the sexy scenes that certainly don’t appear in the novel. But whatever your opinion, there’s no denying that it is an absolutely immersive visual feast—the closest thing possible to being able to touch, taste, or smell through a screen.
Fennell has said she “wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it” as a teenager, and according to Davies, that’s exactly what they did, pulling references from things a teenager in the late ’90s or early 2000s would’ve been familiar with, such as Gone With the Wind and Stanley Kubrick’s films. “Once we found our language, we sort of knew just to keep the dials turned up,” she says. So cue the Charli XCX soundtrack, and let’s break down what all of the design choices mean.
Foreboding darkness versus technicolor at the two homes
If ever there were two literary foils, it is Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the film leans just as heavily on this dichotomy. The former sits high on a hill where the wind never seems to cease (hence its name), and it is dark, cold, and “bruised,” says Davies, with nature always encroaching. It is where Catherine and Heathcliff bond as children. A place the inhabitants want to escape, it was only fitting for Davies to add a large, dramatic archway for characters to pass through when entering and exiting the courtyard, symbolizing a crossing of the threshold between the sad world inside and the possibilities beyond.
When Catherine leaves Wuthering Heights and goes to Thrushcross Grange for the first time, “it’s technicolor,” says Davies. “It’s like she’s never seen this before.” (She hasn’t!) There she meets her neighbors, Edgar and Isabella Linton, and is enveloped in a rainbow of colors and a cornucopia of fabrics—including drapes made of cellophane—and textures. “It looked like a jewelry box,” says Dirickx.
Water, water everywhere
Make your own inference about what this means in this hot and heavy version of Wuthering Heights, but everything in this movie is wet. During AD’s video tour of the Thrushcross Grange set, the camera offers a close-up look at the clear droplets adorning the walls in the dining room. “I think my favorite thing about the room is how it looks like there is really beautiful condensation—like the walls are sweating, but in a very beautiful way,” Margot Robbie says. When Catherine eventually falls ill in the film, the walls of her room (made to look like her skin—more on that coming up!) drip with her actual sweat as well.
Up at Wuthering Heights, the exterior of the home is covered in shiny tiles, something that definitely would not have appeared on an actual home built in Northern England in the 1500s, but Davies selected it for the material’s ability to “feel the sweat and rain that happens all the time there,” she says. “I knew I wanted something shiny and moist.”
The house is alive
Technically, Fennell forgoes exploring Catherine’s ghost to focus much more on concerns of the earthly body…. But these houses still feel haunted, especially with all of the body parts adorning Thrushcross Grange. Plaster hands made from molds of the hands of the film crew are everywhere, appearing as candleholders, a sculpture emerging from the fireplace, and on ceiling roses in every room. “They’re quite a gothic symbol,” says Davies. “It was about [the characters] having their hands on everything. And it’s just that subconscious feeling for the audience, the uneasiness of what those hands are up to. It’s just playing on that sensuality and sexuality of the characters’ love story.”
Other human traits in the design include a table with a hair curtain and the walls of Catherine’s Thrushcross Grange bedroom, which are made to look exactly like her skin. To accomplish this, Davies printed a picture of Margot Robbie’s arm directly onto pieces of fabric, which were then covered in stretched latex to create wall panels. “In that final top shot [of the film], you can see her veins on the carpet too,” reveals Dirickx. Does the sweat pouring from her walls make more sense now? Not only that, but in one scene, tiny prop leeches suck on the walls as well as on Robbie’s body.
“The chains of love are cruel, I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner,” Charli XCX sings
Can you spoil a nearly 180-year-old tale? Well, anyway, after Catherine’s first taste of color and comfort at Thrushcross Grange, she marries Edgar Linton and moves in. You’d think that escaping the prison-like Wuthering Heights (where the ceiling in the kitchen purposefully encroaches upon Jacob Elordi’s six-foot-five frame) would bring her happiness, but her longing for Heathcliff takes hold and doesn’t let go. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” she famously says. She is a prisoner all over again in her new surroundings, and this is represented in the sets. In the library, a lamb sits encased in glass. At dinner, Catherine absentmindedly sticks her finger into an aspic mold with a fish in it.
In the garden, goldfish swim in clear glass vases. And, perhaps most poignantly, everything exists in miniature as Isabella Linton’s plaything, in the dollhouse that sits in the dining room at Thrushcross Grange. It was written into the script by Fennell, and “is such an important part, I think, of her understanding of that book and how she imagined it,” Davies says.
