Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Looks Saucy

Some stories refuse to stay politely inside their century. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has always been one of them—feral, feverish, and melodramatic in a way that would put even the most toxic situationships of 2025 to shame. And now Emerald Fennell, patron saint of the modern, morally sticky pop-gothic, has decided to drag it by the hair into multiplex season.

The first full-length trailer for Wuthering Heights arrived this week, and the internet, predictably, combusted. Between Margot Robbie weaponising melancholy as Catherine Earnshaw, Jacob Elordi deep in his Byronic Villain Era™ as Heathcliff, and Charli XCX scoring the whole thing like it's a heartbroken rave on the moors, the vibe is both “English Lit 101” and “your friend’s increasingly unhinged Pinterest board.”

But before we talk feelings—because oh, there are feelings—let’s break down what’s actually going on here.

Everything We Know about Wuthering Heights

Fennell’s adaptation is being framed as “the greatest love story of all time,” which, depending on your disposition, is either perfectly on brand or hilariously unhinged. Brontë didn’t write a romance; she wrote a psychological cage match set against Yorkshire weather patterns. But Fennell seems to understand that, leaning hard into the illicit, twisted, and frankly masochistic edge that readers have always found both intoxicating and deeply derailing.

Robbie plays Catherine, the wild-hearted heiress who wants love but marries for status. Elordi is Heathcliff, the orphaned outsider who returns from heartbreak with abs and vengeance. Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) is the poor rich boy who walks into the wrong love triangle. Hong Chau and Alison Oliver round out the cast in what already feels like a stacked prestige lineup.

And—because this is Emerald Fennell—we’re also getting colour palettes that look like Sofia Coppola and Derek Jarman got locked in a room together, stylised costuming that’s period-adjacent at best, and at least one scene that has already been described by test audiences as “aggressively provocative.”

Wuthering Heights Trailer Breakdown: The Moors Are Moist and So Are the Fans

The 2-minute clip is a masterclass in tone-setting. It starts soft—Cathy and Heathcliff as children, running across the moors with the kind of doomed innocence you only see in literature and A24 movies.

Then it snaps into adulthood: heavy breathing, stormy nights. Margot Robbie appears first in a close-up, her face lit like a Caravaggio portrait, eyes bright with something between longing and dread. Then Elordi emerges from the shadows of the Earnshaw estate like a man summoned rather than a man returning. His presence is disruptive the second he’s on screen—shoulders tense, jaw clenched, eyes moving like he’s trying to swallow every memory at once.

What follows is a series of emotional whiplashes that almost feel designed to disorient. There’s a scene where Cathy asks, “What would you do, Heathcliff, if you were rich?” and Elordi delivers his reply—“Be cruel to my servants, take a wife”—with a deadpan sharpness that lands somewhere between honesty and self-loathing. It’s funny in the darkest possible way, but also reveals Fennell’s thesis: Heathcliff is not misunderstood. He’s what happens when abandonment calcifies into ambition.

Robbie’s Cathy is equal parts feral and fragile; Elordi plays Heathcliff like he’s one bad day away from licking a wall again (which, by the way, he literally does). The rain kisses? Numerous. The screaming? From both the characters and fans online. The Charli XCX soundtrack is surprisingly perfect mix of lust and doom.

There are gorgeous shots that look like oil paintings—Linus Sandgren’s camera turns the moors into a haunted IMAX scene—and then there are the anachronistic touches that make the purists sweat. A flash of unexpectedly modern fabric. A collar that looks a bit too Vivienne Westwood. Robbie, who is definitively not 19, playing Catherine with the kind of worldliness that has already ignited a thousand discourse threads.

It’s messy, lush, and borderline claustrophobic. And it tells you exactly what kind of film this is going to be: not a love story, but a love reckoning.

Okay, But How Do We Feel About This?

Here’s the thing: adapting Wuthering Heights is always a provocation. The novel is beloved in a way that borders on religious mania for some readers. (Ask any English major who read it at 14 and immediately thought suffering was a love language.) There’s something almost sacrilegious about messing with a text that has lived so loudly in the collective imagination for nearly two centuries.

So Fennell doing her thing—provocative, glossy, sadomasochistic, occasionally shocking—was bound to rub certain corners of the fandom raw.

But here’s the counterpoint: this story has never survived gentle handling. It thrives in extremes. You don’t read Wuthering Heights for quiet yearning or gentlemanly restraint. You read it for passion so intense it borders on psychosis. You read it because it’s messy, because Cathy and Heathcliff make Darcy and Elizabeth look level-headed.

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Fennell gets this. Maybe too well. She’s not interested in polishing the chaos. She’s leaning into it—amplifying the obsession, the toxicity, the erotic despair. She knows that in 2025, we’re living in a culture that fetishises villain arcs and main-character delusion while simultaneously pretending we’re above both.

What she’s doing is holding up a mirror and saying, “You want this. You always have.”

Will purists hate it? Absolutely. Will teenagers discover it, imprint on Elordi as Heathcliff, and spend three years making fan edits to Charli XCX tracks? Absolutely. Will critics debate whether this is feminist reclamation or reckless desecration? Oh, we’re getting think-pieces for days.

But that’s the point.

The Verdict (for Now)

Is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights going to be polarising? Guaranteed. Is it going to be visually stunning, emotionally unhinged, and culturally omnipresent for months? Without question. Is the trailer a promise or a warning? Honestly, both.

But maybe that’s what a 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights should be: seductive, dangerous, uncomfortably intimate, and very aware that its legacy is bigger than any one film.

Fennell isn’t trying to protect the classic—she’s cracking it open all over again.

And honestly? It looks fantastic. And terrible. And irresistible. Which, if we’re being honest with ourselves, is exactly the spirit of Wuthering Heights.