Nothing about the latest Wuthering Heights teaser screams Wuthering Heights.
Upon first watching the teaser of director Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation, one may be distracted by the overt horniness of the entire clip. We open with the wet, dripping sounds of hands kneading against dough, with Charli XCX’s “Fall in Love” lending its beat in the background (And yes, Miss Brat herself will be contributing her own songs to this story set in the Yorkshire Moors of the mid-18th century).
We are then asked to divert our attention to the heaving, tightly corseted chest of Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw (strange choice), her fingers stuck down the throat of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff (an even stranger choice), and what appears to be Elordi’s fingers stuck in between the moist lips of a dead fish (okay?). The teaser feels more like an Addison Rae music video than an adaptation of one of the strongest pieces of literature to come out of the Brontë sisters and of the Gothic genre.
Fans of the novel are loudly pointing out that the film is shaping up to be highly inaccurate and seems to be a dark, Tumblr-esque reimagining. Some have begun comparing it to the “edgy” romance stories that have come out of BookTok, while others have lamented Fennell’s choice in casting. These complaints stem from as far back as July 2024, when many noted that Elordi, a white man, may not have been the best pick to play Heathcliff, who is described in the novel as “a dark-skinned gipsy” or “a little Lascar,” an old-fashioned term for an Indian sailor. Robbie’s casting has also been called into question, especially since her character, Catherine, is meant to be a teenager while the actress herself is 36.
Although Fennell has proven multiple times that she is a more than talented and capable director (See Promising Young Woman, Saltburn), it’s difficult to see how she intends to reconcile the source material’s dark, Gothic romance with what seems to be a hyper-stylized, inaccurate erotica. But perhaps accuracy was never Fennell’s intention; as her casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, told Deadline during a Q&A session in April, “There’s definitely going to be some English lit fans that are not going to be happy.”
