In the blockbuster film Barbie, Margot Robbie innocently asks Ryan Gosling’s Ken why he is so keen for them to spend the night together.
After a moment’s consideration, her on-screen boyfriend admits that he is not “actually sure”.
No such naivety appears to be on display in Robbie’s next outing, a Wuthering Heights adaption that has been described by test audiences as “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive”.
Perhaps the explicit retelling of the Emily Brontë classic should come as no surprise—it has been directed by Emerald Fennell, who was responsible for the 2023 black comedy Saltburn.
According to the movie news website World of Reel, her Wuthering Heights “leans hard into Fennell’s now-familiar brand of stylised depravity”, as it deviates significantly from the source material in which much of the action was left to readers’ imaginations.
Now the “deliberately unromantic” take on the story about the destructive relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is said to feature several “intimate, clinical and purposefully discomforting” masturbation scenes as well as a BDSM-inspired sexual encounter involving horse reins.
Fennell, 39, sets out her stall early. Wuthering Heights is said to open with a public hanging that descends into absurdity, as a condemned man “ejaculates mid-execution”. His throes send the onlooking crowd into an “orgiastic frenzy” and prompt a nun to “fondle the corpse’s visible erection”.
Later scenes involve the camera “lingering on” suggestive textures including egg yolks running through fingers, dough being kneaded with quiet aggression—and, somewhat bizarrely, a slug sliding slowly down glass.
For all the romantics, Wuthering Heights is scheduled to open on Valentine’s Day, two years after Saltburn transfixed audiences with scenes that included one character drinking another’s dirty bathwater.
World Of Reel welcomed the forthcoming adaptation as “the most unusual Wuthering Heights” ever. “The last thing anyone wants is another by-the-numbers adaptation,” it added. “What the next film version called for was a jolt of fresh energy, something bold and unexpected. For better or worse, it seems that’s exactly what Emerald Fennell may have brought to the table.”
The Marlborough College and Oxford University-educated Fennell, who won an Oscar for her 2020 revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, revealed her plan to adapt Wuthering Heights in July with a tweet featuring a Gothic drawing of a skeleton.
It also featured words from Heathcliff, an adopted orphan, as he reveals his desperate passion for Earnshaw, a landowner’s daughter who dies in childbirth. “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad.”
Last year Robbie, 35, described Fennell, 39, as “masterful at tone and plot” in an interview with Variety. The director and actress starred in seasons three and four of The Crown, as Camilla Parker Bowles.
“She gets in your brain and she kind of taps into the most depraved parts of it, so that you’re complicit in the story,” Robbie said. “That’s the water-cooler moment—the thing that people are talking about two weeks afterwards.”
Earlier this year Kharmel Cochrane, the film’s casting director, defended the decision to cast Robbie and Jacob Elordi, 28, both Australians, amid criticism about their ages and ethnicity.
“You really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book,” she told the Sands film festival in Scotland. “There’s definitely going to be some ‘English lit’ fans that are not going to be happy.”
Wuthering Heights has been turned into numerous film adaptations since 1920, including a 1939 Hollywood drama starring Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon and David Niven.
Two major British versions followed in 1970 and 1992, when the lead characters were played by Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, then Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, respectively.
The most recent adaptation was released in 2011 but performed poorly at the box office. All have generally been considered appropriate for younger teens.
Wuthering Heights comes to theaters on Valentine’s Day
Alex Farber is the media correspondent at The Times of London
