There’s a reason Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” presents itself surrounded by the protection of the quotation mark. In a world of adaptations, the punctuation acts as a warning: this is not Brontë’s story as you have seen it before. The Gothic novel we know may not survive the duration of the trailer.
Charli XCX, Yorkshire moors, and lustful caressing of dough. These are the images and sounds that present themselves at the forefront of the trailer. A bare back covered in whip marks reminiscent of some BDSM Fifty Shades of Grey novel, certainly not that of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The trailer is a rebellion against conformity. But is this a rebellion we ever wanted, let alone needed?
Soft pornification or Gothic fidelity?
The term “soft pornification” often carries a pejorative connotation, suggesting a dilution or sensationalisation of more profound themes. Yet, within the Gothic genre, the interplay between eroticism and violence has long been a method of exploring complex human emotions and societal taboos. Sex has frequently been weaponised to examine societal fears and repression. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, perhaps one of the genre’s most famous texts, whilst subdued in its presentation, is undeniably charged with sexuality. Jonathan Harker exclaims, ‘I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’, while Lucy, subverting the idea of the Angel in the House as coined by Coventry Patmore, expresses her desire to ‘Let a girl marry three men’, a wish perversely realised through further later blood transfusions. So is Fennell simply sticking to the conventions of the genre?
There are certainly parallels between Stoker’s charged, and often subversive, eroticism and Fennell’s heightened sensuality. However the modern context complicates matters: today’s audiences are primed to read explicit sexualisation as spectacle, marketing, or even transgression, meaning that which was once an implicit exploration of desire is now perceived as “soft porn.” Contemporary films have seen a notable rise in sexualisation, where erotic imagery is presented in ways that some argue verges on sensationalism rather than narrative necessity. Take, for example, Babygirl (2024), in which Nicole Kidman’s character engages in a taboo office romance with a much younger intern. While the film explores themes of power, desire, and control, critics have accused it of prioritising titillation and scandal over nuanced characterisation, with one review noting that it “walks a thin line that’s just shy of Triple-X entertainment.” So is Fennell simply following the trend, using overt sexualisation to draw audiences in, rather than to serve the story’s deeper thematic intentions? For an Oscar and BAFTA winning director, this seems pretty cheap to say the least.
In this context, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” sits at an interesting intersection. The trailer’s overt sexuality, from sexualised bread-making to Heathcliff’s provocative line, “Do you want me to stop?”, is undoubtedly heightened for modern audiences. Yet it also taps into a long Gothic lineage from Le Fanu’s Carmilla to Carter’s The Bloody Chamber in which eroticism, obsession, and violence are intertwined. The challenge, and the controversy, lies in how contemporary marketing amplifies these elements for immediate impact, sometimes leaving viewers questioning whether they are witnessing literary fidelity or spectacle designed to shock and seduce. The answer will likely divide audiences, as the trailer already has.
Part of this divisiveness comes from the choice of source material itself. If Fennell wanted to create a period-drama sex spectacle, why choose Wuthering Heights? Brontë’s name carries weight, of course, and perhaps it is the tarnishing of such a renowned literary work that fuels the scandal and heightens the anticipation. Or, does Fennell want to tap into this Gothic lineage, exploring sex and sexuality as devices to interrogate power, repression, and obsession?
Whitewashing and the Erasure of Otherness
Jacob Elordi. Conventionally attractive, popular, and undeniably charismatic. But is he Heathcliff? This is the question that many critics have posed already. Brontë’s text is explicit: Heathcliff is “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect.” For the Victorian reader he is an outsider, rejected not just for his class but for his very appearance. This portrayal is inseparable from the novel’s exploration of class, power, lust, and revenge. Casting a conventionally attractive, pale actor risks the eradication of this dimension. It is his outsider status that drives much of Heathcliff’s character; ‘whitewashing’, therefore, softens the stakes and risks reducing the narrative to a Byronic romance, rather than a critique of social prejudice and marginalisation. If his identity as an outsider is aesthetic rather than embodied, can the story carry the same force? Should we really be sacrificing core components of Brontë’s text for contemporary fan favourites? Films today seem trapped in a cycle of familiar faces. The refusal to cast a lesser-known actor who could authentically embody Heathcliff’s racialised outsider status in the novel feels less like a creative choice, and more like a concession to star power, a decision that risks erasing the very social and emotional tensions that drive Brontë’s story.
Other Interpretations
The trailer, in my opinion, hints at a more imaginative reading. Two distinct costume eras are clearly present. One, period accurate, the Regency era of the late seventeen hundreds where the storyline of Catherine and Heathcliff would unfold; the other, Late Victorian, after Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was published. Perhaps, this is an exploration of the Victorian response to Bronte’s text. In this reading, we do not simply view Robbie as Catherine, but as fantasising about being in Catherine’s place. Fennell provides a critique of us as an audience, our appetite for the sensational and perverse, and the parallels this shares with contemporary Victorian engagement with the gothic.
And her critique is justified, we see it with the success of Fennell’s Saltburn (2023), a story not unlike Anthony Minghella’s film The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The plot is simply not groundbreaking. The aesthetics, on the other hand, can certainly be appreciated. With a striking cast in both Saltburn and The Talented Mr Ripley, the colour grading, setting, and design are some of the defining factors that separate the Fennell’s work from the latter. She is actively fuelling this desire for the sensational, not necessarily through plot, but through the visual language of film itself.
In the final moments of the trailer, Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff asks Catherine, ‘Do you want me to stop?’ and it immediately begs a larger question: Is this simply a threat, a seduction or, perhaps more intriguingly, could it be viewed as a challenge directed at us, the audience? In the context of Brontë’s story, it’s Heathcliff asserting control, testing limits, and exposing obsession. In Fennell’s adaptation, however faithful it might be, the trailer hints at a metatheatrical reading: the film asks whether we are willing to be complicit in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”, whether we are ready to put aside our preconceived notions of Brontë, instead confronting the darker, more provocative dimensions of her tale.
For some, this highlights the excitement of the adaptation, a place for creative rather than faithful reimaginings of source material. For others, it strays so far from the novel’s core, and Brontë’s intention, it renders it little more than a spectacle. It may be too soon to tell and all will be revealed in due course, now, all we have is a trailer and the original text. It’s not much to go by, but it certainly sparks an interesting debate…
To misquote Charli XCX, “everything’s still Gothic, right?”
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