The founder of the Support Group for Concerned Citizens Against the Saltburning of Wuthering Heights analyses responses to the trailer of Emerald Fennell’s ill-fated adaptation.
Despite our efforts, I’m sorry to report that the worst has happened. Wuthering Heights has been Saltburnified. The evidence is here, in the three-minute trailer released last week to the instant rage of most of the world.
Before we ask why, here is a summary of what.
The trailer has revealed that director Emerald Fennell has proceeded with slapping neologisms all over Emily Brontë’s story and has focussed, seemingly solely, on sex (which is implied in the book but never described): key elements include a soundtrack by Charli xcx, slutty little glasses, Days of our Lives levels of mood lighting, and Margot Robbie wearing breathless amounts of pink blush while aggressively massaging bread dough and eggs while thinking about Heathcliff who is Jacob Elordi except with a wig and beard pasted on. There is gasping, and crawling scarily/sexily, and “pops” of red and bridal white. At one point, someone pokes their finger into the maw of a dead fish.
The trailer arrived alongside a poster that announces the film’s release on Valentine’s Day 2026 and reads like 1950s soft porn. All submission, soft edges and a jaunty, Clark Gable-esque font. “Wuthering Heights” is in quote marks, which may be a reference to horror movie posters of old, like this one of Carrie, in which the film’s title was sometimes encased. Or, it could be a warning that this is Wuthering Heights but not at all as we know it.
All together, the marketing confirms that Fennell’s approach – much like Saltburn, which riffed off Highsmith’s Ripley among others – is to take a literary framework, strip it of all its layers, and extract from it every possible molecule of heterosexual sex for sexiness’ sake. Fucking, Valentine’s Day.
One discerning member of our club (the Support Group for Concerned Citizens Against the Saltburning of Wuthering Heights) expressed their thoughts on this unholy combination as like the “matcha dubai chocolate labubu of film”.
I still don’t really understand what a Labubu is but if one shows up in the film I think I will have to give up on all of it and bury myself in the mud until this is all over.
And I am not the only one. Responses to the trailer across social media have been numerous and on the whole a collective expression of anger if not bemusement or wry cynicism (like, this is what culture is now, sorry about it). The poor folks over at the Brontë Parsonage Museum had to plead for kindness and open-mindedness such was the outrage piled on their social media posts about the film. I feel bad for their social media manager – it is their job after all to share ongoing responses to the work of the talented sisters.
And yet, if you are one of those arguing that we should all crank our minds open and make room for the fact that Wuthering Heights, the book, was controversial in its time and therefore this “art” that Fennell is proffering ought to be given a chance, then let me explain why this film adaptation is so wounding on an existential level.
Wuthering Heights, the book, was a work of genius. Yes, it was controversial when Emily Brontë published it in 1847 under the pen name of “Ellis Bell”. Therein is the first clue to the depth and significance of this novel: Brontë, a young woman, had to pretend to be a man to let her masterpiece exist. An act of determination, faith and risk.
The stir that Wuthering Heights caused in the 19th Century is down to what was seen as its striking strangeness: the passions and brutality that Brontë unleashed through her characters was entirely new and shocking for contemporary readers. Graham’s Lady Magazine wrote: “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors”. The Literary World magazine wrote: “In the whole story not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration, not one of the fine feelings of our nature seems to have formed a part in the composition of its principal actors. In spite of the disgusting coarseness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound.”
Spellbound. I am not spellbound by Fennell’s trailer or treatment. The reason is that it is not unique, or new or shocking. It’s not even a risk. Our outrage is not against bold art here. It is against blandness. What Brontë did was blast apart an entire genre and defy the gender expectations of her time. She wrote a novel that took in class and race (many responses to this film have pointed out that there is evidence within the text and within Brontë’s life to suggest that Heathcliff should not be a white character) as well as the ineffable and consuming qualities of desire. It is a novel of mercury and mud. Yorkshire has a spirit in the novel and what we get as readers is an invocation of that place: a transportation of the self into a tempest that is thrilling, spooky, spellbinding. Wuthering Heights is not a timeless novel in the sense that it can be so easily manipulated: it is time-bound and as such deserves to have its (fascinating and complex) context treated appropriately.
I think Fennell thinks Saltburn was shocking and that her application of contemporary aesthetics to an iconic 19th Century narrative is shocking too. It’s not. What Fennell is doing is taking a piece of art and reducing it to its dullest form. Trying to apply a visual language to a novel that has a sixth sense hanging between the lines can’t work. It’s like trying to visualise an afterlife: it very rarely succeeds when translated into image because an afterlife, much like brute desire in 1847, doesn’t exist on that plane.
Where Fennell succeeded in the past was with Promising Young Woman. That film was new, original and honest. If Fennell wants to explore heterosexual fantasies of desire and control with a contemporary soundtrack by an artist sure to assist with box office takings (which she clearly does) then why not write something new?
At worst, this adaptation of Wuthering Heights reminds me of AI image-making. A new language for our times from which a slick monster has emerged – a too-smooth amalgamation of parts of parts. Always, something is off, an element is ill-formed – the entire creation lacking in human intelligence, a deeper meaning, evidence of work and process.
However, comrades, let’s be buoyed: at least we have Hamnet.
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