September 5, 2025, 9:03am

Last year around this time, the internet was astir about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation, and in particular about its casting: Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Because for one thing, as our critic argued, neither seems quite demented enough to play either of these truly reprehensible, batshit “lovers,” and for another thing, Heathcliff is, in the book, explicitly not white. It’s part of his whole plotline.

Now, we finally have a trailer, and clearly plotline is far beside the point. This is going to be a very horny, very sumptuous, and possibly indeed demented movie, apparently featuring a fair amount of finger sucking and BDSM:

Of course, despite its reputation (?), Wuthering Heights (1847) is a deeply unsexy book. Elizabeth Harwick called it “a virgin’s story,” and wrote that “nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book.

Emily Brontë appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

The movie is coming out on Valentine’s day next year, which seems to fit with the cultural understanding of Wuthering Heights as an epic love story, though like Hardwick, I’ve never really understood the book this way. It’s not really romantic at all. It’s a ghost story, if it’s anything. It’s an endless downward spiral into the dark.

So when the title card comes, Wuthering Heights is in scare quotes, which makes sense. This is, at most, “Wuthering Heights.” I mean, Charli XCX did the music! Come on.

But all of this is, in my opinion, fine. Of course Fennell is making an abrasive, porny movie that may or may not open with a corpse ejaculating. Of course it’s not going to be an earnest adaptation. Honestly, I think she’s having some fun with all of this (and with us). She sees your clutched pearls and laughs. Just look at the poster, which pointedly references another famous epic adaptation of a highly problematic literary love story (Gone With the Wind, if you’re new here).

Personally, I am holding out hope that Fennell understands how deeply depraved this novel is, and is simply using the impressionist’s brush to portray said depravity in a modern way. She’s not usually that subtle, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be.