I hope the Wuthering Heights trailers never stop dropping. I hope they keep dropping even after the movie comes out in February. They should cut new ones through all of 2026 and into the following year, ahead of what I can only imagine will be the inevitable release of 2027’s 2 Wuthering 2 Furious. And I hope we never stop arguing about them. In a few short years, Emerald Fennell has somehow managed to become one of our more controversial directors, and the fact that she’s made an adaptation of one of the most beloved (and adapted) literary works of all time has clearly driven everybody insane. This is mostly a good thing. More movies should be driving us insane.
The latest Wuthering Heights trailer appears to be a slight corrective to (or maybe, more accurately, an expansion of) the previous one, which emphasized the symbolic, sensuous, slimy, psychosexual elements of Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel. That was the one with all the extreme close-ups of kneading dough and gooey eggs and fingers in fish and people crawling on the floor with their tongues hanging out. It also came on the heels of some still-unfounded but wonderful rumors of outraged early test screenings filled with terminal ejaculations and fondle-some nuns. The new one takes a step back to remind us that this will, indeed, be a literate and swooning adaptation of “the greatest love story of all time” [maybe sic, more on that in a bit] and it’s heavier on the big dresses and the grasping hands and ornate interiors. But it’s no less stylized; Emerald Fennell learned at the feet of Joe Wright, and we should never forget that. There are impeccably framed weddings and bounteous dinner tables and windswept vistas and rumbling skies. Margot Robbie becomes a doll grasped and pushed by a giant hand. Jacob Elordi rides against a Searchers-red sunset. Everybody licks the big pink flesh wall.
Sure, it’s all just marketing, designed to hit various segments of the allegedly dwindling moviegoing population in a desperate effort to convince them to sulk away from the true crime and the Real Housewives and the bad comedy and lug their butts to the movie theater. The first trailer was for the degenerates (me) and this new one is for the literary snobs (also me), and I suppose the next one will be for the epic nerds (’tis I) and the one after that for the grimdark brooders (hi). Marketing sells the sizzle and not the steak, as they say, and right now Wuthering Heights is so much sizzle that it’s possible we won’t even need the steak.
Still, I can’t help but be excited for this adaptation. Those who feel that Emerald Fennell might not have been ruthlessly faithful to the source material should remind themselves that there are approximately 1,036 other adaptations of Wuthering Heights out there (I can say confidently that I have seen most of them — by the way, definitely check out the one with young Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff), and at this point we should hope that each version brings something new to the table. I was originally skeptical of Elordi as Heathcliff: The actor seemed a bit too aloof and delicate to play such a force of nature. But having been moved greatly by his performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, it’s clear to me that the man has quite a bit more range than I suspected. Robbie, meanwhile, can already do anything, and I like the idea that this version of Catherine will be some unholy combination of her Barbie, Elizabeth I, Nadine Belfort, and Nellie LaRoy.
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More importantly, Wuthering Heights, the book, is in fact a dark and beautifully deranged tale of lust and obsession and abuse and inexpressible longing, and the idea of filling the screen with extreme images of surreal, slithery sensuality and dripping depravity does not represent some blasphemous subversion of a hallowed original text. And the fact that Fennell has cast Hong Chau as Nelly Dean suggests she knows what she’s doing: Nelly is the secret mover behind the narrative of Wuthering Heights, alternately devious and credulous, and all too often the adaptations sideline her to part of the scenery. Putting an actress of such subtle power in that part is a promising development. (I’ll be curious to see if there’s even a nod to the generation that follows the story’s main characters. They take up quite a bit of the novel, and most adaptations ignore them entirely. Maybe we’ll see them in 2 Wuthering, etc.)
Okay, so is Wuthering Heights a great love story, let alone the greatest? Jury’s out on that one and will be for several more centuries. It’s certainly a tale of adoration and its equal-and-opposite force, destruction. The story of Catherine and Heathcliff captures the kinetic, all-consuming pull that people can have on each other, and as such it’s certainly romance-adjacent, though I’m not sure anyone in the story ever expresses anything resembling what we today might think of as love. (That said, Wuthering Heights is certainly more of a love story than The Great Gatsby, which people keep mistaking for a romance when it is in fact an anti-romance.) But it’s also worth noting that the trailers identify this film as being “inspired by” Brontë’s original, so it’s more than likely that Fennell isn’t worried too much about fidelity. Is that a good sign or a bad sign? Will this be more Bram Stoker’s Dracula or more Roland Joffé’s The Scarlet Letter? We’ll be fighting about that until February and well beyond.
