On "yearning"

Emotional recommendation, and whatever the opposite of a recommendation is

Ok, brace yourselves, gang, I’m doing a cold open. No niceties, no welcome back to Emotional Speculation, just this: did anyone listen to the New Yorker Critics at Large episode on Heated Rivalry?

I did, of course, because I’m mentally unwell and need to consume every possible piece of media about something I’m obsessed with (did you think I was going to fixate on Heated Rivalry and not write about it? Come on, lads! You know better than that!). Obviously, listening to actual critics engage seriously with the gay ice hockey show did make me feel sort of justified for being insane about it, but that’s by the by. The reason I’m bringing it up is that in this episode, they critics declared 2026 the “year of yearning”. And boy, were they right! Certainly from a pop cultural perspective, yearning is everywhere. What’s left of the free press is publishing thinkpieces about it, the dating apps are building whole new words around it in a bid to reconnect with their user base, and then, of course, there’s the current number one film in the world.

Emerald Fennell - a director who boldly asks the question “what if every film was a really long music video” - has released her latest offering, “Wuthering Heights”, and has built its entire marketing campaign on the concept of yearning. Cathy yearns for Heathcliff! Heathcliff yearns for Cathy! You, the audience, will yearn for Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie! In Fennell’s trippy, high-octane adaptation, yearning is the main theme of the whole story. It’s maybe the only theme of the whole story, if her interviews are anything to go by.

Before I go on, let me clarify that I was under no illusions that any of these people were “right” for the job of faithfully adapting Wuthering Heights. This is not another essay from a bookish gal about Emily Bronte turning in her grave (although, yes, I have read them all). I went into that cinema on Monday evening expecting something completely divorced from the source material, and honestly, I was fine with that. I was a little curious, and happy to settle in to see what a Mills & Boon bodice ripper would look like with a massive budget. I like romance! I like movies about romance! And I am extremely bored of romance about teenagers, or adults who can’t communicate with each other. I wasn’t expecting good per se, but I was ready for some passion, and passion was what they were selling this film on.

Anyway. I didn’t get any of it. Putting aside the fact that the film is little more than a series of nicely framed GIFs in a trench coat and that it was made by three people who had perhaps never actually met a northern person, my prevailing thought in that cinema screening was: is this it?

Because - and I say this with love in my heart - watching Margot Robbie suck Jacob Elordi’s fingers in a bedazzled handsome cab, at the height of the film’s romantic build up, it really hit me that we had been duped. The chemistry that the film had packaged itself on was simply not there. Let me tell you: no bodices were ripped in the making of this film. Not one! At no point did I believe that these were two people who couldn’t get enough of each other. Instead, I felt like I was watching two of the world’s most bankable film stars make one of those high budget alcohol adverts. A yearn fest, this was not.

lovers??? photo: Warner Bros

On paper, Heated Rivalry shares a lot of similarities with “Wuthering Heights” (go with me here). Like “Wuthering Heights”, Heated Rivalry is everywhere right now. It went straight to the top of all streaming charts around the world. It also traded on its on-screen passion to court viewers, and has also sparked widespread fan discussion about the chemistry between the two leads. The difference, beyond the obvious (budget, genre), is that Heated Rivalry delivers on what it promises: it’s a hot and - crucially - credible portrayal of yearning and intimacy.

(there are spoilers ahead btw - but I imagine you’ve all seen both anyway, if you’re reading this, so carry on x)

Heated Rivalry is about desire and longing and the conflict that can come when you feel those things for the wrong person - supposedly, all the same beats as Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. But where Fennell’s film mines both its characters and audience for shock or arousal or sadness at every turn, Heated Rivalry shows us the characters, plainly and sincerely. It lets us make up our mind about them instead of telling us, loudly, how they feel. In short, it treats both the characters and the audience with respect.

At the end of “Wuthering Heights”, Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff and his slutty little earring burst into Cathy’s flesh-coloured bedroom, where we have just seen her bleed out dramatically. He throws himself on her corpse, says his classic line (haunt me then!), and then we’re treated to a flashback of their child-selves, to really hammer the point home that they’ve yearned for each other forever. It felt, to me, like a lazy grab for nostalgia, a shortcut to an emotional pay off that was otherwise unearned (I did not cry, despite every effort the film was making to coax a tear out of me).

Meanwhile, in the final episode of Heated Rivalry, when Shane and Ilya finally spend a whole weekend together (at the cottage that spawned a thousand memes), they are never not touching. They are never not in the same frame. They’re finally in the daylight together, and you really feel it: this thing they’ve pined for for years is here. When the emotional pay offs come - first when they tell each other they love each other and then when Shane comes out to his mother - they’re unflashy but feel like a dam breaking nonetheless. I cried both times! I was so happy for these boys who had yearned for this for so long, hoping and praying that one day they might get what they want!

Lovers!! aka my sweet boys <3 Photo: Sabrina Lantos

The New Yorker’s Critics at Large said there are some YA undertones to the show, and I can see where they’re coming from. I mean, we haven’t had a “happy ending romance” about actual adults for a long time, and our reference points are all skewed. The best on-screen (happy) yearning we’ve had in years is Belly and Conrad, for crying out loud. But honestly, watching “Wuthering Heights”, I kept thinking about how Emerald Fennell’s impulse was to make the version of the book she experienced as a teenager. Kind of like fan fiction… or YA. And truly, all the snippiest things that are said about YA romance - it’s reductive, it’s pandering, it lacks nuance - could be said about this film. From a romantic point of view, it is reductive, and it does pander to its audience’s assumed baser instincts, and it is significantly lacking in nuance. On the surface, everything about the film - from its colour palette to its casting to its script - is supposed to make us think about sex, but there’s nothing beneath that surface to make the thought hold. As a result, it feels sort of hollow. On the other hand, Heated Rivalry has a pretty sparse script, and much of the important emotional beats are communicated physically. The yearning we witness is true to life in that it is quiet and so, so loud all at once, and it also demands our full attention because a lot of the emotional heavy lifting is done silently between two actors with really, really great chemistry.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think the reason Heated Rivalry succeeds where “Wuthering Heights” fails is that it treats its audience like grown ups who can a) trust their own eyes and b) don’t need to be spoon-fed. This is just one gal’s opinion, but ultimately, if 2026 is the year of yearning, I hope the powers that be (studio execs) understand what exactly we, the people, yearn for. We want our romance treated with reverence rather than as something to be exploited. We don’t want to be gaslit into thinking two people have chemistry when they plainly don’t. Don’t just shove two good looking people onto our screens on a wing and a prayer and call it a day. Let us yearn to our full potential!

Anyway, here ends my emotional recommendation. If you haven’t already, I implore you to go and watch Heated Rivalry, and then if you still want more, do as I did and listen to Tonsil Hockey by Olga Koch and Catherine Bohart, which is a hilarious, beautiful piece of media about yearning in and of itself.

xoxo