Emerald Fennell makes the kink explicit in the first teaser for Wuthering Heights

Somehow, we’re only four months away from the year two thousand and twenty-six. Scientists can probably explain, but I am sure that it is, ultimately, the sun’s fault. But that does mean that 2026 movies are on the horizon, including Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, about which there is already much curiosity and fretting, as many people fear/assume that It Will Be Pervy and people will have to Think About Sex and maybe even discuss the Nuances of Desire As Depicted On A Cinematic Screen. Our society is currently not capable of dealing with cinematic desire cranked to a level higher than “closed-mouth Hallmark kisses”, so this is going to be a fun time for everyone. Again: probably the sun’s fault.

The teaser for Wuthering Heights dropped yesterday. There is a heavy emphasis on aesthetic, with lots of lush, beautiful shots of the windswept moors, glistening skin, rich interiors and elaborate costumes. Margot Robbie as Cathy Earnshaw, one of literature’s greatest c-nts, has permanently flushed cheeks. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, one of literature’s greatest abusers, always looks like he just came. There is also an emphasis on kink, particularly dominance and submission, but also binding and breath play—all things that boil down to control.

People try to sell Wuthering Heights as everything from a religious allegory to a non-religious allegory to a socio-political commentary to a screed against the strict classist society of pre-industrial England, even as a romance, but the real ones know that Wuthering Heights is a horny book about horny people being furious that they’re not f-cking. Emily Brontë brought forth Wuthering Heights and promptly died, probably from terminal horniness. Jane Austen was like, “Oh, to fall in love, how romantic yet how silly, let me write down my acute observations of this life and society with a happy ending which I, myself, shall not receive”; meanwhile, Emily Brontë was like, “Someone rail me in the goddamn hay bales before I perish!”

It appears that Emerald Fennell gets it. Cathy and Heathcliff are awful, everyone around them is awful, too, and they live in a deeply repressed society in which no one can be honest about their kinks. When you can’t, or won’t, let your freak flag fly freely, you inevitably turn into an angry weirdo (Veep understood this perfectly in the character of Jonah Ryan). Wuthering Heights is full of angry weirdos, but Fennell is making the kink explicit. Will she make sex explicit, too? Cathy and Heathcliff are famously chaste, with each other, anyway. (The most interesting read is that they refrain from sex because they subconsciously suspect they’re half-siblings.) If she DOES make sex explicit, is that an inherent betrayal of Wuthering Heights?

People are already up in arms about this adaptation, from anachronistic elements—a matter of style and taste, always negotiable in an adaptation—to Jacob Elordi’s casting—not unreasonable to want to finally see a non-white Heathcliff realized on screen—to the overtly toxic tone of the teaser to the poster, which references Gone With the Wind and another famously noxious literary coupling.

It is clear after her first two films, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, that Emerald Fennell likes to provoke, and Wuthering Heights is ripe for provocation. It was provocative in its day, after all, with many criticizing the “vulgar” language and behavior of the characters and it has always been viewed simultaneously as a love story and a revenge story. You cannot separate love from violence in Wuthering Heights. The question is just how far Fennell will take that, and how willingly the audience will go along with it. There is an obvious answer that Fennell doesn’t care if you go along with it or not, this is just what she’s doing regardless of audience enthusiasm.

Wuthering Heights is about a bunch of angry pervs metaphorically f-cking each other into the grave and beyond. If Fennell decides to make the subtext text, I don’t think I’ll care just because the “Wuthering Heights is a romance” thing is annoying. Just because Cathy said her soul and Heathcliff’s soul are made of the same stuff doesn’t make it a romance. Sh-t is stuff. She could be saying they have sh-t souls.

Anyway, I’m here for a pervy kinky toxic Wuthering Heights, because I do think those qualities are baked into the subtext and making it explicit is just freeing Emily Brontë from her repressive historical prison. Let Emily Brontë’s freak flag fly!