The new trailer for Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights that frames it as a great love story feels like a step backwards

Because the sun is our most relentless enemy, we are now two months closer to 2026, which means we are two months closer to the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”, which means it’s time for a new trailer. The new trailer also features new music from Charlie XCX, who is making a whole album inspired by Fennell’s film.

While the teaser was all about toxicity and kink, the full trailer is more about the love story of Wuthering Heights, going so far as to tag the film as being “inspired by the greatest love story of all time”, which is exactly the kind of bullsh-t take about Wuthering Heights I do not support. Honestly, nothing about Emerald Fennell’s filmmaking or her approach to this material could ever annoy me as greatly as proclaiming Wuthering Heights, a story about two festering boils of humanity, a great love story.

But if you look at any poll of great literary love stories, you’re bound to find Wuthering Heights at the top of the chart, followed by some ordering of Jane Eyre, Romeo & Juliet, and Gone With the Wind, because when people talk about their favorite love stories, they are almost always talking about stories that either involve some degree of abuse or love between idiotic children (R&J). We love love as long as it’s either toxic as f-ck or kids killing themselves over their first crush not calling them back fast enough. Actual, healthy expressions of love between adults take a back seat to complete tire fires emotionally dragging each other for decades.

Anyway, no complaints about the actual substance of the trailer. The visual look stunning. I just do not care about anachronistic clothing or pop music on the soundtrack or any of that. Emerald Fennell is working in a distinctive style, I am down with it, and she’s allowed to frame her version of Wuthering Heights however she likes, just as we are each allowed to decide how we respond to it. I’m already sick of seeing people complain about historical inaccuracy, it’s a movie for chrissakes, it is going to reflect the taste and style of the people who made it, who are probably not you. (If you’re reading this Emerald Fennell, howdy.)

I’m just so peeved about the marketing. I loved the teaser because it felt like Fennell got the subtext that everyone in Wuthering Heights is miserable because they live in a society so restrictive as to be an actual nightmare, but this trailer feels like a step backward. But maybe it’s a response to the criticism of the teaser, over which a lot of people flipped their lids about the prospect of Too Much Sex on screen. We’re still in the marketing phase, so we’ll have to wait for the full film to see how far Fennell does or does not take the toxic subtext of the story.

At least we know there will definitely be some weird sh-t, there’s still plenty of licking and biting in his trailer. Wuthering Heights is for the orally fixated.