As a Literature graduate and avid reader, I love nothing more than indulging in a quality film or period drama, finding joy in watching my favourite classics come to life on the big screen. Not often that a director gets it right, my hopes for the new film Wuthering Heights were meagre to begin with. Following years of Disney remakes, live adaptations and what feels like a complete lack of fresh scripts, Director Emerald Fennel’s new trailer has finally been released – to the disgust and anger of the internet, Instagram and X (Twitter), bursting into angry flames in its wake.
Sharing the outrage of Bronte’s readers by the casting of Hollywood actors Margot Robbie, 35, and Jacob Elordi, 28, earlier this year, I couldn’t help but hope for a miracle – or at the very least a substantial effort from their makeup and costume department. Releasing the long-awaited (and dreaded, in my case) trailer on September 3, a new wave of upset crashed through social platforms at the modern ‘365-party girl’ take. Here are my three reasons why Fennel’s Saltburn style fails the Yorkshire classic.
A soundtrack by Charli XCX
Watching the teaser for the first time, my initial feeling was that of horror over the song choice: Everything Is Romantic, by Charli XCX. I was left confused as to why the 2024 Brat summer star, known for her wild party aesthetic, was paired with one of Britain’s greatest novels. The international hyperpop singer is a shameless user of autotune, which she has previously defended as her artistic right to achieve her ‘it girl’ goal.
And although I have been a dedicated listener of her various albums for over a decade, I believe a composition of layered emotional depth is needed to support the moral turmoil between the protagonists—a quality the singer’s club classics lack. In a form where soundtracks can both establish and affect the actors’ dialogue and its reception, the trailer left me abashed.
A Valentine’s special
What is celebrated as a carefully construed text of class, race, society and themes of love, appears to have been reduced to what viewers are calling “the fourth instalment of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise” – a comment which has gained over 5,000 likes under the official YouTube clip. Confirmed to be in cinemas on February 13, 2026, the loosely based trailer is congested with raunchy scenes of an explicit nature. Though a novel known for its overwhelming romance, I was left reeling at the two-dimensional teaser of bare-chested shots – Robbie’s lusting Kathy truly foreign to the good-natured Katherine and darkly demanding Heathcliff.
The white-washing of Heathcliff
And if the trailer wasn’t butchering enough, the initial question of casting remains ever-present: in what world is Jacob Elordi an accurate Heathcliff? Handsome, brunette and a towering 6’5″, Elordi is beloved for his roles in Priscilla, Saltburn and even his Netflix debut, The Kissing Booth. Whilst an accomplished actor, the inaccuracy of the Australian playing the role of a character described as having dark “Gypsy” looks and assumed Moorish blood strips the already figurative project from its intrinsic discussion of race during the Bronte period. Tom Hardy may have gotten away with it in 2009, but in a time where it means more to the viewer than ever, Elordi simply cannot.
Not to even mention Robbie’s inability to dye her hair a brown or don a wig, the Gothic and moral nature of the original text, which has inspired decades of study and philosophical analysis, relies on the characterisation of an ambiguous Heathcliff, completely ‘othered’ to Kathy, and yet finding a likeness within her. The trailer confirmed my every fear, which is that the commercialisation of pop culture and the erasure of Brown/Black representation in Hollywood is now deeply embedded in Western media.
The speech marks enclusing Fennell’s title a potential loophole is inaffective and a poor answer to the uproar her public launch in April. Speaking to Variety, the director wrote: “Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperilled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip. It’s a genre where comedy and horror, revulsion and desire, sex and death are forever entwined, where every exchange is heavy with the threat of violence, or sex or both”. If so, then why does she fail to deliver?