Emerald Fennell’s long-rumoured, already-controversial take on Wuthering Heights has finally dropped its first full-length trailer, and it’s as bold, provocative and beautifully unhinged as you might expect from the filmmaker behind Saltburn and Promising Young Woman.
This isn’t your school-set-text Wuthering Heights, it’s stormy, sexy, messy, and full of the sharp edges that made Emily Brontë’s only novel famous in the first place.
The new trailer leans into the intensity of Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), beginning with their childhood connection before tumbling into the iconic, toxic, soul-rattling adult relationship that’s defined literature’s most chaotic couple.
There are rain-drenched embraces, screaming matches on the moors, and a storm of longing looks, all powered by Chains of Love, a brand-new Charli XCX track created for the film’s soundtrack album. It’s goth romance with neon blood in its veins.
It makes sense that any filmmaker touching Wuthering Heights is stepping into a minefield. Since its 1847 release, Brontë’s book has been a lightning rod for debate, dismissed as “brutal” and “wild” in its own century, later reclaimed as a masterpiece of obsession, class, colonial tension and emotional extremity.
Heathcliff’s ambiguous origins, Catherine’s self-destructive decisions, and the novel’s looping structure have fuelled generations of arguments about how the story should look and who its characters should be. Fennell, unsurprisingly, seems uninterested in calming that conversation down.
Instead, she appears to be leaning all the way in. Early reactions from test screenings called the film “aggressively provocative,” with one scene of a public hanging already making the rounds online for its shock factor.
The casting has sparked familiar discourse: Robbie, some say, is too old to play Cathy; Elordi, others argue, doesn’t reflect the racial ambiguity many readers attribute to Heathcliff. Even Fennell’s involvement has raised eyebrows, given her reputation for pushing boundaries and refusing to tidy up messy characters.
Margot Robbie also produces via LuckyChap, marking her third partnership with Fennell after Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. The cast includes Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, along with Hong Chau, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes and Ewan Mitchell. Warner Bros will release the film globally on Valentine’s Day 2026, a deliciously chaotic date for one of literature’s most famously doomed romances.
If the trailer is anything to go by, this adaptation isn’t just retelling Wuthering Heights; it’s resurrecting the original novel’s wildest instincts. Expect passion, cruelty, beauty, shock value and more.
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