23/02/2026
Emotional films have a particular way of bypassing our usual defences. Stories like Hamnet and especially Wuthering Heights often leave people feeling stirred, unsettled, even quietly shaken.
What seems to be echoed across conversations — among women and men alike — is a sense of inner contradiction. The film stirs powerful feelings: longing, desire, identification with the rawness of connection. At the same time, it can clash with deeply held values about healthy love, equality, and emotional safety.
Embracing these emotions doesn’t mean romanticising suffering. It means allowing ourselves to acknowledge that love and pain are deeply connected. To love intensely is to risk loss. To care deeply is to feel deeply.
When we witness characters navigating heartbreak and longing, we are reminded that our own difficult emotions are not signs of weakness, but signs of attachment, meaning, and humanity.
The enduring power of the story, may lie in its refusal to present love as gentle or easily understood. Instead, it exposes attachment in its most elemental form — passionate, obsessive, wounded, and at times destructive. It does not offer moral reassurance. It simply presents the intensity.
The therapist whose reflections are shared here highlights something important: the discomfort itself matters. Rather than rushing to label the relationship as purely romantic or purely toxic, there is value in noticing the pull and the resistance. Both reactions coexist. Both tell us something about human experience.
From a person-centred perspective, what stands out is the invitation to stay with those reactions without immediately judging them. When a story unsettles us, it can illuminate parts of ourselves that are rarely acknowledged — the part that longs for depth and fusion, the part that fears engulfment, the part that recognises how easily love and pain can intertwine.
The conversations this film generates suggest that these tensions are not individual failings but shared human complexities. The emotional turbulence many people report speaks to something archetypal — a reminder that attraction, attachment, and identity are not always neat or rational.
Perhaps the most meaningful takeaway is not whether the characters’ relationship is admirable or harmful, but what the viewer notices arising within themselves. In that noticing, there is space for curiosity rather than certainty — and in that space, deeper understanding can begin.
The original novel by Emily Brontë has long been described as a story of obsessive love, revenge, and wild attachment. Perhaps what makes it so powerful is that it does not sanitise these impulses. It exposes them. And that exposure can feel destabilising.
From a person-centred perspective, I find that stance meaningful. So often we want to tidy our responses, to align them neatly with our conscious beliefs. But perhaps growth lies in allowing ourselves to notice what is stirred — without judgement. The parts of us that are drawn to intensity. The parts that fear it. The parts that remember something primal about longing and loss.
What stayed with me most is the reminder that being person-centred does not mean being free from contradiction. It means being willing to meet ourselves honestly. If a story unsettles us, that in itself is worth listening to.
I’m curious what it evoked for others. Not whether it was “good” or “bad,” romantic or harmful — but what it stirred. Because sometimes the most valuable insight comes not from the film itself, but from the feelings we would rather not claim.
A S*x Therapist's Critique of Wuthering Heights:
A kink-informed, feminist, and trauma-aware perspective of the new film.
Key points:
Romantic myths equate suffering with love.
Trauma shapes attachment and for some, chaos can feel like connection.
Care, consent, and choice define healthy relationships.
Agency and vulnerability can coexist within power imbalances.
Emerald Fennell’s 2026 rendition of Wuthering Heights draws viewers in with a provocative, kink-coded atmosphere reminiscent of Fifty Shades of Grey, similarly distorting what kink actually looks like while highlighting tensions around love, s*xuality, power, and consent that feel deeply human and relevant. As a s*x therapist, the film left me asking: What do these characters believe love is supposed to feel like? What options do they actually have? And how do history and social forces shape their choices?
Trauma Bonding and the Shape of Love:
Heathcliff and Catherine grow up in emotionally harsh environments. When people learn love in conditions of insecurity, attachment can feel urgent and consuming. What looks obsessive from the outside may feel like recognition from the inside–finally, someone who understands me. When safety has been scarce, emotional volatility can feel like aliveness.
The chemistry between the leads is palpable. That does not mean their relationship is healthy–but it does mean it makes sense. Trauma shapes attachment. It teaches us what love feels like, what we expect from it, and what we fear losing. If calm, steady love feels unfamiliar, it can even feel threatening. When passion has been the only language of connection, quiet security may seem dull or unreal.
Understanding this softens the story. We are not simply watching villains; we are watching people loving with the tools they were given–while still recognizing that harm is harm, regardless of its origin.
Intensity Is Not the Same as Care
A kink-informed lens helps distinguish between intensity and health. Power and intensity are not inherently harmful; what matters is whether they are grounded in consent, mutual choice, and care.
Power becomes concerning when it is:
Imposed rather than chosen
Rigid rather than responsive
Indifferent rather than attentive
Do the characters experience their interactions as voluntary? Do they feel they can refuse, leave, or renegotiate? Do they articulate desire, or submit to forces they perceive as inevitable? These questions are especially compelling in Isabella’s storyline.
Isabella: Empowered and Vulnerable
Isabella is often dismissed as naïve for falling for Heathcliff, but that interpretation flattens her. She chooses him, pursues him, insists on him even when warned. At the same time, she is socially and emotionally vulnerable. Respecting her means taking her desire seriously, even if the outcome is painful.
Does Heathcliff Care for Isabella?
Here, Fennell offers rare clarity, allowing us to consider whether this relationship actually aligns with the principles that define healthy kink dynamics. Heathcliff’s involvement with Isabella is not grounded in care for her; he leverages her desire to provoke Catherine and fuel jealousy. In doing so, he turns Isabella into part of his emotional strategy even as she experiences empowerment within the dynamic.
Care shows up as curiosity about another person’s feelings. Passion without care is not devotion. Most kink relationships are grounded in consent and mutual respect, but practices involving power can magnify existing imbalances, which is why context matters: our vulnerabilities, the other person’s power, and the relational dynamic between them.
The Tragic Roots of Romantic Love
To understand why this story feels so dramatic, it helps to remember the cultural history of romance. In medieval Europe, courtly love stories idealized longing, suffering, and emotional torment, while real marriages were often structured around property and inheritance. Passionate love narratives existed in contrast to social reality.
Over time, we inherited cultural scripts suggesting:
Love should feel overwhelming
Yearning proves depth
Suffering makes love meaningful
Security and excitement cannot co-exist
It is no surprise that many famous love stories–from Romeo and Juliet to Wuthering Heights–end in tragedy. Turmoil is visually compelling. If we filmed only the most painful moments of a relationship, we would have powerful cinema. If we filmed the peaceful parts–the communication, repair, consent, and care–we might think nothing was happening. Healthy love rarely generates the chaos that fuels a plot.
This invites reflection: When did we learn that longing means love? Why does calm connection sometimes feel less convincing than dramatic pursuit? When we feel consumed by someone, are we experiencing love or recognition?
As s*x and relationship therapists, we often emphasize that deeply satisfying relationships tend to be grounded in steadiness, respect, emotional safety, and genuine care–alongside passion and desire when those matter to the partners involved. But because healthy love would look like paint drying onscreen, and that doesn’t sell tickets, many of us are raised instead on stories of tragic romance.
Consent Then and Now
The story also unfolds within a world shaped by class hierarchy, gender norms, and limited options for women. Choice existed, but within constraints. Isabella chooses Heathcliff. Catherine chooses Edgar. Their decisions are real, yet shaped by the systems surrounding them.
This raises enduring questions: When is choice fully free? When is it shaped by pressure, fantasy, or limited alternatives? Can agency exist even when options are constrained? These questions rarely have simple answers, but they encourage humility and compassion toward choices that make sense in someone else’s world.
A Feminist Lens on Choice
Through a contemporary feminist lens–one that values women defining their own desires–Isabella’s story becomes less about foolishness and more about will. She acts. She decides. She chooses. We do not have to celebrate her choices to respect that they are hers.
A mature reading holds two truths at once: that Isabella has agency and power imbalances still surround her. The experience of being both self-directed and mistaken is, for many of us, deeply familiar.
Why This Story Still Matters?
Stories like Wuthering Heights endure not because they show us what love should be, but because they reveal what many of us have been taught love is supposed to feel like. They reflect cultural myths that equate longing with depth and suffering with devotion, even as this film complicates those ideas through its portrayal of power and desire.
Viewed through this lens, what stands out is not only the characters’ volatility but how familiar it feels. Many people have mistaken emotional chaos for chemistry or longing for connection. The film exposes how desire can tangle with power, how agency can coexist with vulnerability, and how love can feel convincing even when it lacks care.
That is why the story still resonates. Not because it models love, but because it asks us to examine what we believe love is. Dramatic passion with kinky undertones thrown in for good measure may make alluring cinema, but in real relationships, it is care and consent–not chaos–that sustains us.
Kat Kova MSc, RP, PhD Candidate
