Wuthering Hamnets! Stories that keep us talking
We’re in a packed cinema on a warm Sydney evening. As the scheduled movie begins, we are immediately transported to an 18th century village square where a public hanging is taking place. The atmosphere is festival-like, rowdy and highly charged; when the crowd quietens after the corpse is finally still, a figure jumps up and shouts jubilantly, “It’s f–ing hanging day!”, and the crowd erupts in cheering.
This is Emerald Fennell’s version of “Wuthering Heights” (2026), and for some reason it’s making me think of research interpretation and how we report our findings.
11 days later we’re in a cooler, smaller theatre, maybe half full. This time we open on a tranquil forest scene with an overhead shot of a woman in a red dress, curled up asleep in the enormous roots of an ancient tree. As she wakes and walks through the woodland, she seems at one with the natural environment; she calls a hawk to her arm and speaks tenderly to it as it feeds on whatever meaty snack she is offering.
This is Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (2025), and it is also provoking thoughts about research, interpretations, and how not reading the book beforehand was a really good move.
Two stories, both alike in dignity (or maybe not)
Each movie offers a perspective on a book of the same name, and at first glance are playing in the same narrative ballpark, albeit a couple of centuries apart. There are dramatic ‘love stories’ at the centre (Cathy and Heathcliff’s twisted romance vs. Agnes and Shakespeare’s grief-riven relationship); people die in tragic circumstances; sweeping English landscapes form fundamental backdrops to each story; well-known actors breathe life into literary and historical characters.
In style and substance, they couldn’t be more different. Fennell uses those “Wuthering Heights” quotation marks to stress that this is her version of the story, intended to "recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time". The critics have plenty to say on this; my own memory of the film is saturated with vivid colour, over-sized buildings and shiny costumes, a dark, moody Charli xcx soundtrack and some rain. Not quite damp enough to be proper Yorkshire weather, but I’m being picky.
In contrast, my memory of Hamnet is green, brown, and muddy (much more Yorkshire, though it is set mostly in Stratford-upon-Avon); Jessie Buckley seems to wear iterations of the same murky red dress through most of the film; we see dirt under everyone’s fingernails; the score is minimalist Max Richter, all atmosphere and haunting strings. There is less rain, except for a harrowing childbirth scene when there is a lot of rain, and water seeps under a door.
So who did it better? And is that even the right question?
Stay ‘faithful’ to source material, or make it fresh?
Both films have been criticised for what and how they choose to interpret popular texts. Zhao is apparently mostly faithful to the Hamnet book (if not to historical facts) and the screenplay was co-written with its author Maggie O’Farrell. It has variously been criticised as being unsubtle, uncomfortably voyeuristic, too neat and a fallacious misreading. Fennell then pushes creative licence to its limits with Wuthering Heights and changes key details (spoiler alert: Cathy and Heathcliff never actually get together in the book). Some critics go harder, calling it an artificial music video, Brontë Barbie and in my favourite nod to Kate Bush, ‘too hot, too greedy’. Due to her untimely demise in 1848, Emily Brontë was unavailable for any screenwriting collaborations.
Does staying faithful to the source material actually matter? In movies, despite the endless critiques and debates, perhaps not. If you’re a researcher, however, offering a robust interpretation of your source material is pretty important – especially if someone intends to make decisions based on your findings, which is usually the idea. In my case, the ‘source material’ is usually interviews, groups, and observations of various kinds, often triangulated with other background research and context.
Here’s where it gets murkier than Jessie’s dress: to experience the ‘original version’ of qualitative research source material, the audience would have to be in every interview and discussion. Clients do come and observe fieldwork sessions, but I have yet to find one who attends every single hour of interviewing, watches every recording or reads all the transcripts. If they did, I’d be questioning what they brought me in for.
When any researcher works through the analysis and reporting process, there is no perfect, objective interpretation. All research reports are contestable adaptations of slippery, subjective truths, as any researcher who has argued passionately with a colleague about the same set of interviews will tell you. There are only versions, and the directorial choices we make in how we present those versions.
Yes, I just compared market researchers to movie directors. Also, I found out last week that Margaret Atwood once worked at a Canadian market research company, so really it’s just a matter of time before one of us has a breakout hit.
‘The End’ is where it starts
Seeing these two films so close together sparked a bunch of conversations with anyone and everyone I can engage in the topic. Whether they’ve read the books or not, seen both or just one of the films, I want to know what they think. The stories didn’t stop when I left the cinema; I had only just finished reading Wuthering Heights and now I want to read it again; we never did Hamlet at school and now I want to read it, or see it, or maybe both. I want to read Hamnet too, and see what made it to the screen and what was left out.
For me, that’s what makes a really great research debrief. I want to tie up loose ends in the narrative, but also leave space for the listener to build on what they’ve heard. My very favourite debrief sessions are the ones that go over time, not because I talked too much (although I do, sometimes) but because the attendees wanted to dig deeper, know more, and start linking the research to their work. The report isn’t an end point, but the catalyst for the next stage, creating curiosity, excitement, and motivation to push forward and do things differently. It may not have the hyper-driven drama of “Wuthering Heights” or the deep emotion of Hamnet, but if I can get people talking, that’s a happy enough ending for me.