The first teaser for Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming film Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, has finally dropped.
Fennell’s film adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel, which follows the relationship between the Earnshaws and the Lintons in rural Yorkshire around 1770 and the tumultuous relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, has been eagerly anticipated since it was first announced last year.
The film also stars Hong Chau as Nelly Dean, Alison Oliver as Isabella Linton, Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, and Adolescence star Owen Cooper as the younger Heathcliff.
Set to Charli xcx’s “Everything is romantic”, the teaser shows Catherine thinking about Heathcliff who tells her he’ll follow her “like a dog till the end of the world”.
There is a longer shot of Catherine in a 1980s-style wedding dress, images of which went viral on social media when Robbie was still filming.
Her dress was heavily criticised at the time, with fans saying it didn’t fit the timeline the book was set in.
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The casting of Elordi as Heathcliff has also drawn criticism since his character is described in the book as having dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and is believed to be from a Roma or Gypsy background.
Another contentious point criticised by Brontë readers is that Elordi and Robbie are the wrong ages for their characters who are teenagers for much of the book’s plot.
Casting director Kharmel Cochrane has since said that if people are offended by the casting decisions, then the set design is “even more shocking”.
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“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” Cochrane said at the Sands Film Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, according to Deadline.
“But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art. “There’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy. Wait until you see the set design, because that is even more shocking. And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.”
Fans still don’t seem particularly taken with the film after the teaser release, with descriptions of it on social media calling it “visually pretty but entirely hollow & wrong”.
“Not to be that one friend who is too woke but bleaching the class and racial otherness out of wuthering heights to sell a horny whitewashed romance genuinely pisses me off,” one person wrote on X.
Another wrote: “Emily Bronte is rising from her grave as we speak because why did they turn Wuthering Heights into fifty shades of Heathcliff and Cathy.”
At a test screening last month, the movie received mixed reviews with the audience branding it “sexually explicit” and “tonally abrasive”.
One audience member at the test screening in Dallas described the film as “aggressively provocative” and said it had parallels with the “stylised depravity” seen in director Fennell’s provocative 2023 dark comedy Saltburn.
The film reportedly opens with a public hanging that descends into absurdity when the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”.
This apparently sends the onlooking crowd into an “orgiastic frenzy”, prompting a nun to “fondle the corpse’s visible erection”.
One attendee said there were scenes of “purposefully discomforting masturbation”, a sexual bondage encounter involving horse reins and shots of “suggestive textures” such as egg yolks, bread dough and slug trails.
Wuthering Heights is set for release in theatres on 13 February 2026.
