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Emerald Fennell’s vision for Wuthering Heights is coming into focus.
The first full-length trailer for the Saltburn writer-director’s already controversial adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel sketches out an epic love story – “the greatest love story of all time”, according to a title card – beyond the erotic visuals of the first trailer.
The trailer sees Brontë’s star-crossed lovers, Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) meeting first as children, then becoming tangled in a torturous love affair as adults in the West Yorkshire moors. “What would you do, Heathcliff, if you were rich?” Robbie’s Cathy asks Elordi’s Heathcliff. “I suppose I’d do what all rich men do,” he answers. “Live in a big house, be cruel to my servants, take a wife.”
As in the book – the only novel completed by Brontë – Cathy marries the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) to retain her social status, causing a devastated Heathcliff to flee and vow revenge. But the two struggle with their feelings and, indeed, the trailer includes several clips of kissing and crying in the rain to a new song created by Charli xcx, Chains of Love, as part of a new album to be released with the film in February.
Viewers also glimpse some anachronistic fashions and Fennell’s signature colorful flourishes. “So kiss me, and let us both be damned,” Elordi’s Heathcliff says to Cathy at trailer’s end.
The Promising Young Woman director, known for her love of mordant envelope-pushing, found controversy from the start with her erotically charged take on the English literature classic. The film’s casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, defended her choices after some suggested that Robbie was too old to play the role of a young maiden, while others questioned Elordi’s ethnicity, as Heathcliff is generally perceived to have a Romany or Gypsy background and darker skin.
Reactions to a test screening in August were reportedly mixed, with one attender calling the adaptation “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive” with one scene of a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”.
Fennell responded to some of the criticisms in September; at Brontë Women’s Writing festival, the Oscar-winning screenwriter said the novel “cracked me open” after reading it at 14 years old.
“I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she said. “I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private.
“[It is] an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you,” she added. “There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.”
Wuthering Heights will be released in cinemas on Valentine’s Day in 2026.
