Every teenage girl that gets into Victorian literature is assigned a Brontë sister to relate to. There are the Charlottes, who love their passionate and plain heroine in Jane Eyre and the mad first wife stalking the attic. And then there are the Emilys, who worship the deliciously messed up, pseudo-incestuous doomed love affair between Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
Personally I’m a Charlotte, so I know better to rile up the Emilys. But Emerald Fennell doesn’t seem to care, as her film adaptation of Wuthering Heights continues to infuriate fans of the book. If they were already furious about the casting and the set photos, the teaser trailer (which dropped last night) has sent them into an orbit of apoplexy.
Wuthering Heights is arguably a pretty effed up book and the trailer suggests Fennell is taking some freaky Saltburn-style swings. But not in the direction fans had hoped. Let’s unpack the main offences:
It wasn’t like this in the book!
Casting Jacob Elordi, a white man, as a character generally understood to be racially ambiguous in the text was Fennell’s first offense. A brooding anti-hero, Heathcliff’s ‘otherness’ is underscored by Brontë’s descriptions of his dark complexion and unknown parentage.
Recent adaptations have tended to cast non-white actors in the role. But given that Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy have all taken a stab at Heathcliff, Fennell isn’t bucking a huge trend here. Although, the film poster that looks exactly like that of (slave plantation romance) Gone With the Wind does give us pause.
Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw is less of an obvious choice. Book Cathy doesn’t reach the age of 20 before she dies in childbirth, and is described as fairly feral with lots of brown hair. Robbie is still bright blond in the trailer, and while actresses should be allowed to play younger if men are, she is 35 to Elordi’s 28.
It’s really horny but not the right kind of horny
It’s a really sexy trailer in a very gross (complimentary) way. There’s lots of eroticised bread kneading, yolk fondling, and people putting their fingers in each other’s mouths. At one point someone pokes a digit into a frozen fish orifice. Elordi is all shirtless and sweaty, Robbie has a lot of bosom heaving going on.
Corsets are tightened (against bare skin, a big no-no from a historical costume perspective!) and bodices ripped. Someone — maybe the character of Isabella — is being walked like a dog, while horse bridles and whips are being cracked out in a rather BDSM manner. Some people are grousing that it all seems very BookTok Romantasy.
Wuthering Heights is also a very horny book, but in a Victorian sense where it’s all subtext and longing. Although, come on, at one point Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s body (still preserved in all it’s sexiness thanks to the moors) because he wants to be buried next to her: “I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me ; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.” Given Fennell already has a film with some grave sexy time, those passages will probably get some artistic licence taken to them in the adaptation.
From what we’ve heard from audience test screenings, the full film could be even more weird/sexual. “The film opens with a public hanging that quickly descends into grotesque absurdity, as the condemned man ejaculates mid-execution, sending the onlooking crowd into a kind of orgiastic frenzy. A nun even fondles the corpse’s visible erection,” reported World of Reel. Buckle up!
What is Charli xcx doing here?
Oh you thought Kate Bush’s Heathcliff might be here? Psych! It’s Charli xcx with a remix of Everything is romantic and promise that she’s writing a new song for the film soundtrack. Contemporary needledrops are so hot right now in cinema and arguably Cathy was the Victorian version of Brat. Still, Fennell playing so fast and loose with a classic seems to be upsetting to the purists.
Looks like the time period is a bit screwy too
Period costume pedants were already fuming at set photos of Robbie as Cathy in a low-cut white wedding dress. Given the 1800s setting of the book, when even wealthy women married in a best dress of any colour, this does seem pretty anachronistic. In the trailer, there seem to be some surreal sequences with blood-red floors and powder-blue walls with faces spewing chains of pearls.
By this point it seems pretty obvious that Fennell is going for some modern twists with her period drama, much like anachronistic cult favourite Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.
Wuthering Height’s isn’t out until 14 February 2026 (Vday, natch!) so we still have plenty of time to argue about it all.
