Gen Z get big shock after discovering Wuthering Heights doesn’t have a contented ending
As tragic love stories go, it’s famously up there with Romeo and Juliet.
But the fact that Wuthering Heights might just possibly not have a happy ending appears to have been lost on Gen Z.
The latest big screen version of Emily Bronte’s 1847 classic novel opened in cinemas yesterday, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as lovers Cathy and Heathcliff.
And before long social media was awash with messages from mostly young women in floods of tears as the final credits rolled.
The Daily Mail is not giving away what happens in the movie – but given that the novel has been taught in schools for generations and filmed many times, we probably don’t need to.
However, that hasn’t stopped Gen Z fans who finished the film issuing the warning: ‘Do not see Wuthering Heights without knowing the plot.’
One girl filmed her friend who was sobbing in the darkened cinema and posted a video on TikTok with the caption: ‘I fully thought Wuthering Heights had a happy ending. I really thought I was just gonna watch Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi make out for two hours.’
Another, also hysterical on camera, said: ‘We are crashing out. I don’t know how to go back to real life. Also, it’s a sad ending if anyone else didn’t know.’
One film-goer (pictured) was filmed hysterically crying on TikTok after watching Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights
Another viewer (pictured) was unaware of the tragic events interspersed throughout the film
Jacob Elordi (left) and Margot Robbie (right) star as Heathcliff and Cathy in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s 1847 classic novel
The new version is from British director Emerald Fennell, whose tinkering with the text has divided critics.
Some have branded her take on the Gothic romance as an ’emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire’ that would have the author ‘rolling in her grave.’ Others, however, praised the ‘swoonily romantic’ movie.
Speaking before the film’s launch Ms Fennell, 40, encouraged such a hysterical reaction from her audiences and admitted she was hoping for it.
She told Time Out: ‘I want lots of snogging [in the cinema]. I think whatever you can get away with – sorry, Cineworld. There will be some of that, there will also be a lot of people having to be carried out because they’re crying so much.
‘I really love seeing movies where people have a visceral experience. I think screaming and laughing and crying and gasping, we want a connected experience.’
But Ms Fennell, who won an Oscar for her directorial debut Promising Young Woman, has warned fans of the novel that her adaptation is a loose, eroticised interpretation that ‘files’ the classic novel down to its ‘pretty and sexy bits.’
