Emerald Fennell is the Bonnie Blue of cinema

The first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is here. Released last night (September 3), the teaser features Margot Robbie as Cathy Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, and offers first glimpses of their co-stars including Alison Oliver, Hong Chau, and Owen Cooper (who starred as teen killer Jamie in Netflix’s Adolescence earlier this year) in character.

Fennell’s adaptation has been mired in criticism from the get-go. She stoked considerable backlash after revealing that she had cast Robbie and Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff respectively in September last year, marking a significant deviation from the source material (if you’re unfamiliar: Cathy is a dark-haired teenager, while Heathcliff is implied to be mixed-race). She courted controversy again earlier this year after new photos of Robbie wearing a white wedding dress on set were released; the pictures prompted many fans of the novel to point out that Robbie’s costume is anachronistic, as white wedding dresses were only popularised after Queen Victoria wore a white dress to her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840 (the events of Wuthering Heights take place long before the marriage).

It’s only been out in the world for less than 24 hours, but the new trailer – along with the announcement that Charli xcx is contributing original songs to the soundtrack – has already sent viewers spiralling. Fennell has apparently stuck to her usual shock value-over-substance schtick; the film looks both aesthetically jarring and emotionally hollow. It’s no wonder viewers of a test screening described the film as “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive”, as the trailer includes a number of suggestive, BDSM-tinged moments, including but not limited to: the camera lingering on hands kneading dough and splitting egg yolks; scissors slicing through a bodice; Robbie being aggressively laced into a constrictive corset; someone worming their finger into a dead fish’s mouth; a woman being tied up with horse reins; Oliver (who plays Isabella Linton) inexplicably crawling around on all fours.

I can sympathise with Brontë purists who are primarily concerned with just how far the film has strayed from the canonical text and its historical context. The novel, as taut as it is, demands minimal intervention. But Fennell’s crime isn’t merely playing fast and loose with ‘accuracy’ – it’s being more concerned with generating outrage and going viral than saying anything remotely interesting or thought-provoking. The film isn’t even out yet, granted, but it’s easy to predict how Wuthering Heights is going to go. Ragebait has long been Fennell’s modus operandi: take Saltburn, her 2023 ‘thriller’ which was initially billed as a biting, shrewd eat-the-rich satire with echoes of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. In reality, it turned out to be a meandering punch-down on the middle classes, shot through with pointless, provocative scenes, including an instance where Barry Keoghan slurps on semen-infused bathwater.

Many – arguably most – good films and literature are visceral and shocking. Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, commonly regarded as the golden era of English theatre, were characterised by their extreme violence. In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the eponymous Duchess is psychologically tortured by her brother, who tricks her into thinking her family are dead by producing corpse-like effigies of their bodies. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus sees protagonist Titus kill two of his adversaries before baking their bodies into a pie and serving it to their mother. Clearly, audiences have always been open to being disturbed and unsettled, provided there’s a point to all the gore. But Fennell, as ideologically bankrupt as she is, is seldom communicating anything at all through her ‘shocking’, sexed-up scenes.

It’s depressing but unsurprising that someone like Fennell is doing so well in our attention economy, where the more eyeballs on your work, the more money you can make – and with so many competing demands on our attention, the only way of creating something truly thumb-stopping (and subsequently lucrative) is by being as provocative as possible. In many ways, Fennell is the Bonnie Blue of cinema: little more than an outrage-farming ‘creator’. Oh well. If, like me, Fennell has caused your blood pressure to spike and you need to calm down, you can peruse some of the most scathing memes about Wuthering Heights in the gallery below.