In September, the first teaser trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was released to widespread derision. We got a glimpse of Fennell’s vision for the classic novel and that vision was… not great. Fennell doesn’t care about period details, she doesn’t care that her teenage heroine is being played by 30-something Margot Robbie, and she doesn’t care about the actual original text by Emily Bronte. To make matters worse, Fennell organized some test screenings for the film and those people TALKED. They said the film is “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive, leans hard into Fennell’s now-familiar brand of stylized depravity. It’s a deliberately unromantic take on Brontë’s novel, stripped of emotional nuance and full of salacious detours that serve shock value.” Well, there’s now a full-length trailer and it honestly looks like they’re trying to “soften” the imagery:
LOL, I’m out. While this trailer is at least attempting to connect the film to the book, it’s beyond clear that Fennell took some really wild liberties with the text. It’s crazy because I love Margot Robbie and I genuinely believe she’s an underrated actress, but she was miscast here, and that’s such a central thing. I do think Jacob Elordi would have been a decent Heathcliff in a straight adaptation, but who knows what he’s doing here.
Photos/screencaps courtesy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ trailer, poster courtesy of Warner Bros.
