15 Best Movies Like Wuthering Heights That Hit Just as Hard

Del Toro has said himself that this is not a horror film. It’s a gothic romance that happens to have ghosts in it. The ghosts aren’t the scary part. The house isn’t the scary part. The scary part is watching a woman fall completely in love with someone who is dangerous to her — and seeing her choose to follow him anyway. That’s extremely Wuthering Heights.

Mia Wasikowska plays a young American writer who falls for a brooding English baronet and follows him back to his crumbling family home in the north of England. The house is rotting. Red clay seeps through the floors like blood. And slowly she starts to understand that the man she loves is also the person she should be most afraid of. Visually it’s stunning — probably the most beautiful film on this list. Emotionally it’s darker than most horror films ever get.

This is Hitchcock, from 1940, and it belongs right at the top of any list of movies like Wuthering Heights. A shy young woman marries a wealthy widower and moves into his enormous estate — Manderley. But his first wife Rebecca is dead, and somehow she still controls everything. The housekeeper is obsessed with her memory. The husband barely speaks about her. And slowly the new wife realises that she’s married into a house that already belongs to someone else.

What connects it to Brontë’s world is the husband — Maxim de Winter. A man completely shaped by a love he can never talk about, carrying something he can’t put down. Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier are both brilliant, but the film really belongs to the woman whose face you never see. Still unsettling more than 80 years later. One of the best dark romance films ever made, full stop.

In some ways the complete opposite of Heathcliff and Cathy — this love story is gentle, tender, conducted through letters and brief meetings rather than obsession and violence. And yet Jane Campion’s film gives you the same feeling of watching something completely impossible and completely real at the same time. John Keats and Fanny Brawne are in love at exactly the wrong moment, in exactly the wrong circumstances. There is no future for them. They both know it.

Abbie Cornish as Fanny is one of the most underrated performances in any period romance — a woman who feels everything and has almost no way to express it in the world she lives in. If you want films like Wuthering Heights that trade the fury for longing, this is the one to watch. It’ll stay with you.

Set on the grey Dorset coast in the 1840s, and the landscape does exactly what the moors do in Wuthering Heights — it tells you how the characters are feeling without anyone having to say a word. Kate Winslet plays Mary Anning, a real fossil hunter who spent her life working on a cold beach that nobody really noticed. Saoirse Ronan plays a geologist’s wife who gets left in her care. What happens between them is told mostly through looks, silences, and the way two people occupy the same space.

Some critics called it too cold and too slow. I thought it was precise — every moment doing exactly what it needed to do. The feeling it leaves you with is the same one Wuthering Heights leaves you with: the sense of a love that was real and that didn’t get to exist properly. That’s a rare thing to pull off.

A 13-year-old girl sees something between her older sister and a young man who works for the family. She misunderstands what she sees — or maybe she understands too well and does something with it anyway. What follows from that single moment is a catastrophe that nobody can undo. That’s the whole film, and it’s devastating.

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley are quietly brilliant together, which makes the third act so much harder to watch. There’s a tracking shot at Dunkirk that’s famous and rightly so. But the real cruelty of Atonement is what comes after it — the thing the film does in its final minutes that you don’t see coming. One of the best romantic drama films of the 2000s, and genuinely underrated as an obsessive love story.

Yes, scholars have pointed out that the film takes liberties with the real Jane Austen story. That’s fair. But as a romance film about a woman who meets exactly the right person at exactly the wrong time, it earns its place on this list. Tom Lefroy matches Jane intellectually, challenges her, makes her feel things she hasn’t felt before. And marrying him would financially ruin them both. So she doesn’t.

Anne Hathaway is genuinely good here — funnier and sharper than she gets credit for. The film doesn’t go for tragedy. It goes for something quieter and more adult: the specific sadness of understanding what something costs and paying it anyway. It’s the gentlest film on this list. But the longing underneath it is absolutely in the Wuthering Heights tradition.

Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene is the closest thing in Victorian literature to a female Heathcliff — independent, intelligent, and fatally drawn to the wrong kind of man. Carey Mulligan plays her brilliantly: someone who knows what she’s doing and can’t stop herself anyway. Sound familiar?

What this 2015 version gets right is the triangle at the centre of the story. Gabriel Oak loves her steadily and asks for nothing. Sergeant Troy electrifies her and leaves damage behind. And William Boldwood’s obsession tips from devotion into something that starts to feel threatening. It’s a film about what different kinds of love ask of people. The landscape does what the moors do — it makes everything feel larger and more inevitable. One of the most underrated romance movies similar to Wuthering Heights that almost nobody talks about.

This might be the purest Wuthering Heights film on the entire list — and it’s set in postwar Poland, shot in black and white, and only 88 minutes long. A music director and a young folk singer keep finding each other and losing each other across 15 years and multiple countries. They are completely wrong for each other. They cannot stay apart. The film never explains them. It just shows you what they are to each other, which is everything, and what that costs them, which is also everything.

88 minutes. That’s it. And somehow that restraint makes it even more brutal — like you’re only getting fragments of a much larger destruction. One of the best doomed love story films made in the last decade. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on MUBI and worth every minute. Watch it in Polish.

If I had to pick one film on this list that comes closest to the emotional feeling of Wuthering Heights — not the setting, not the period, but the actual feeling — this would be it. A painter is secretly commissioned to paint a young woman’s portrait in 18th century Brittany. The young woman doesn’t know she’s being painted. Then she finds out. And everything changes.

What makes it so extraordinary is that both of them know from the beginning that what’s happening between them has to end. There’s no future. There’s only now. And the film is about what it means to be completely present in something you know you’re already losing. The final scene — just a face, and Vivaldi — is one of the most devastating things I’ve seen in a cinema. No shouting, no confrontation. Just the full weight of something ending. An absolute must-watch for anyone looking for romance films like Wuthering Heights.

Three children grow up together in a strange English boarding school. The film slowly reveals what they are and what their future holds — and I won’t spoil it, but once you know, the love triangle at the centre of it becomes almost unbearable to watch. These three people love each other while knowing exactly what’s coming. And they just… continue. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley. All three are exceptional.

What connects this to Wuthering Heights is the acceptance. Heathcliff rages against his fate. The characters in Never Let Me Go don’t. They accept it with a quiet passivity that makes you want to shake them — and that gap between what you want them to do and what they do is where the whole film lives. Quiet, English, absolutely merciless. One of the most underrated films like Wuthering Heights you’ll find on streaming right now.

Won nine Oscars. Was briefly unfashionable to admit liking. Completely holds up. Ralph Fiennes as a badly burned man in a Tuscan villa at the end of World War II — his past slowly coming back through memory, centred on a love affair in the North African desert that burned through everything around it, including eventually the war itself.

This is one of the definitive obsessive love story films — the kind where loving someone makes you incapable of functioning as a normal human being, and you choose it anyway. Kristin Scott Thomas as Katherine Clifton is extraordinary: a woman who sees exactly what she’s doing and does it anyway, because not doing it feels like not being alive. The film understands what Wuthering Heights understands — that the most destructive love stories aren’t accidents. They’re decisions.

Brad Pitt’s Tristan Ludlow is the closest thing Hollywood has made to Heathcliff in the last 30 years. Wild, magnetic, impossible to hold onto, and genuinely ruinous to everyone who loves him. The film spans decades of a Montana family falling apart, with Susannah — the woman all three brothers love — at the centre, and Tristan as the force of nature she can’t resist and can’t survive.

It’s a big, dramatic, slightly operatic film. Some people find it too much. I think that’s exactly the point — Wuthering Heights is too much too. For anyone who finds the Heathcliff archetype genuinely compelling rather than just problematic, this is essential. It’s on Netflix. Just watch it.

Scorsese directed this. Yes, that Scorsese. And it’s one of the most quietly brutal romantic films ever made. New York high society in the 1870s: a lawyer engaged to a perfectly suitable woman falls irreversibly in love with her unconventional cousin who’s just returned from Europe with a scandal following her. Nothing dramatic happens. That’s almost the whole point — the film is about everything that doesn’t happen, which turns out to be worse than anything that could.

The connection to Wuthering Heights is how society functions as a kind of cage — how rules and reputations and expectations suppress feeling until the feeling has nowhere left to go. Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man drowning in public, in the most elegant room you’ve ever seen. Scorsese filmed it like a documentary of something violent. One of the most underrated romance movies ever made, and almost nobody under 40 has seen it.

1960s Hong Kong. Two neighbours in a busy apartment building slowly realise their spouses are having an affair with each other. What happens next is not what you’d expect — and I won’t say more than that. Wong Kar-wai makes a film that’s almost entirely about restraint. Two people standing at the edge of something and refusing to cross it, over and over again, until the refusing itself becomes consuming.

This is the most different film on this list in terms of setting and style. But it might be the closest to Wuthering Heights in terms of emotional core — that specific ache of being near someone you can’t have and choosing, repeatedly, not to cross the line. The slow-motion sequences with Shigeru Umebayashi’s score are some of the most beautiful images in cinema. A film about desire denied, which is desire at its most intense. One of the greatest romance movies ever made.

The cruelest film on this list. Not because anything violent happens — nothing does. Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens, a butler so committed to his profession and so emotionally locked up that when Emma Thompson’s housekeeper — who sees him clearly, who could love him, who wants to — offers him a way out, he simply cannot take it. He just. Cannot. Do it.

Where Wuthering Heights gives you too much love — love that destroys because it’s too large to contain — The Remains of the Day gives you the opposite. Love that destroys because it was never allowed to exist at all. There’s a scene on a pier near the end where Stevens comes as close as he’ll ever get to honesty. Hopkins barely moves. That’s the whole film in one moment. For anyone who found Heathcliff’s rage exhausting and wants the same devastation delivered in total stillness — this is your film. The most underrated romantic film on Netflix right now.