Wuthering Heights: bold new trailer for Emerald Fennell’s epic adaptation

Published: 14 November 2025. The English Chronicle Desk. The English Chronicle Online.

Emerald Fennell’s vision for Wuthering Heights is coming into focus. The first full-length trailer for the Saltburn writer-director’s already controversial adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel sketches out an epic love story—“the greatest love story of all time,” according to a title card—beyond the erotic visuals of the first trailer.

The trailer introduces Brontë’s star-crossed lovers, Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), meeting first as children and then becoming entangled in a torturous love affair as adults on the windswept West Yorkshire moors. “What would you do, Heathcliff, if you were rich?” Robbie’s Cathy asks Elordi’s Heathcliff. “I suppose I’d do what all rich men do,” he answers. “Live in a big house, be cruel to my servants, take a wife.”

As in the novel—the only one Brontë completed—Cathy marries the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) to retain her social standing, leaving a devastated Heathcliff to flee and vow revenge. The trailer shows the pair struggling with their feelings, including scenes of kissing and crying in the rain, set to a new song by Charli XCX, Chains of Love, created for the film and its accompanying soundtrack to be released in February.

Viewers also glimpse some anachronistic fashions and Fennell’s signature colorful flourishes. At the trailer’s climax, Heathcliff tells Cathy, “So kiss me, and let us both be damned.”

Fennell, known for her mordant, boundary-pushing style in Promising Young Woman, has faced controversy from the start with her erotically charged take on the English literature classic. Casting decisions drew particular scrutiny, with some questioning Robbie’s age for the role of a young maiden and Elordi’s ethnicity, given that Heathcliff is traditionally depicted as Romany or of darker skin.

Reactions to a test screening in August were reportedly mixed, with one attendee calling the adaptation “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive,” including one scene of a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution.”

Fennell responded to the criticisms at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in September, saying the novel “cracked me open” after reading it at age 14. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book. I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private,” she said.

She added, “[It is] an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.”