Hello everyone who's been inundated with videos of people who innocently spent their Valentine's Day watching Wuthering Heights in theaters and came out of the movie completely unwell. We're here to talk about the ending.
If you've read the book, you know Wuthering Heights doesn't exactly end on a happy note. However, the film is a lot different than Emily Brontë's source material, so let's go ahead and get into it.
How Does Wuthering Heights End?
To put it bluntly: Cathy dies. More specifically, she flies into such a deep depression upon Heathcliff marrying Isabella that she takes to her bed, refuses to eat, suffers a miscarriage, and develops sepsis. Nelly and Edgar don't notice how serious Cathy's condition is until it's too late, and she dies in her "Skin Room."
Heathcliff rushes to Cathy's side, but is too late, and he begs her to haunt him. The film ends with a flashback to them in bed as kids, when Heathcliff says he'll always love her. Bittersweet! Emphasis on bitter.
How Is This Ending Different Than the Book?
Cathy dies in the novel, but her death comes midway through, and there's an entire generation of characters that continue the story—including her daughter, also named Cathy. She eventually marries Isabella and Heathcliff's son, but he dies, and she's stuck living with Heathcliff—who's pretty much lost it at this point (like, digging up graves levels of lost it).
The book ends with Younger Cathy marrying her first cousin (he was cut from the film) and Heathcliff dies in Cathy 1.0's old room. Their ghosts roam the moors together, so at least there's that?
Director Emerald Fennell explained her major changes to the book, telling Entertainment Weekly, "I think, really, I would do a miniseries and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful. But if you’re making a movie, and you’ve got to be fairly tight, you’ve got to make those kinds of hard decisions."
Speaking of her ending, she added "It begins where it ends and ends where it begins. And that’s the thing about love, and it’s the thing about the book, right? It’s that it’s forever and it’s cyclical, and so there’s no stop — even when there’s a terrible, sad, tragic stop, it’s not really a stop — because that’s what the book feels so much about. It’s about the depths of human feeling and how it exists in a profound way, not just a physical one. And so that, I don’t know, that felt like the right way to end it for me."
