Brontë meets Bridgerton meets Barbie: purists slate Wuthering Heights trailer

This is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. At least, the trailer for a new film adaptation of the classic novel by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell – and it has sent the internet into a frenzy. “Emily Brontë is rolling in her grave,” declared one fan.

Fennell’s adaptation has been cultivating controversy for months. First, its casting director was forced to defend appointing Robbie and fellow Australian actor Jacob Elordi as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, after a backlash over the failure to address the latter’s ethnicity, generally interpreted as Romany or Gypsy, and 35-year-old Robbie playing a character who dies as a teenager.

Then, as details leaked from test screenings last month, Wuthering Heights purists feared the worst. Audiences reported an “aggressively provocative” feature, with a “stylised depravity” recognisable from Fennell’s Saltburn.

“People feel very proprietorial about [adaptations], so it's quite a responsibility,” said Deborah Moggach, novelist and writer of the screenplay for 2005’s Pride & Prejudice. "You’ve got the weight of people’s hopes and expectations on your shoulders.”

The trailer confirms a healthy dose of anachronism; surreal backdrops, rooms with blood-red floors, a 1980s-style wedding dress, and even a brief shot of Robbie wearing the trend of the summer – “slutty little glasses”. Charli XCX, the pop superstar behind bestselling album Brat, will contribute original music.

“It seems like Fennell is prepared to tear up the core themes of the book and turn it into something else,” said Wendy Ide, The Observer’s chief film critic. The trailer ticks the boxes of conspicuously cool cultural touchpoints and picks up from where Saltburn’s infamous grave scene left off, but does it shy away from what is truly shocking about Brontë’s work?

It is a novel of “raw energy, unpredictability and unknowability”, said writer and literary critic Catherine Taylor. Adding a glaze of visual perfection could detract from that.

“We’re in the age of Bridgerton-ing,” said Taylor, referencing the successful Netflix drama that has become famous for its raunchy, deliberately anachronistic approach to period drama. “In a way, that’s wonderful, because it doesn’t stick to an all-white cast. But they’ve missed a trick here.”

It is often the case, Taylor said, that screen adaptations of literary classics carry hallmarks of the era in which they are made, such as the 1967 version of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, which features distinctly decade-appropriate hair and makeup.

“We want our quote, unquote ‘romantic heroes and heroines’ to be unapproachable, but we also want them to reflect us,” she said.

Looking at the Wuthering Heights trailer, Taylor found Cathy’s modern makeup jarring, but points to an audience demand for the homogeneous “Instagram face” of this era.

“My philosophy would be: one should be truthful to the author and the book, and not show off, not change it for change’s sake,” said Moggach.

In adapting novels for screen, Ide said: “There are always going to be people who are entirely in love with a book – and if you take a risk, there will always be people who condemn that.”

She points to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest as “the high benchmark for a literary adaptation … It shares the title, shares the location, but is such a wildly avant garde interpretation of a book that’s powerful in its own right.”

Ide and Taylor see the trailer as “a provocation” – and one that’s clearly worked. “The fact that we’re talking about it now shows how effective it is,” Ide said.

“I still probably won’t go and see it,” said Taylor. But it has had an unexpected side-effect. “It makes me want to go back to the book for the first time in many years.

“I studied it to death at A-level and hated that book by the end, but I do now want to reread it, so thank you Emerald Fennell.”

Photograph by Warner Bros. Other pictures by Samir Hussein/WireImage