What if the Emerald Fennell Wuthering Heights is good? 

Every few months or so, a new film comes along and anyone interested in the art of cinema braces themselves, because The Discourse will inevitably accompany it. There is no clearer candidate for fevered discussion next year than Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which is released, with smirking predictability, on Valentine’s Day. Ever since the film was announced, there has been controversy over everything from the casting of the Caucasian Jacob Elordi to play Heathcliff (who is referred to in Emily Brontë’s original novel as a “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect”) to the excessively clean and stylish-looking clothes worn by Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw. When reports of strong sexual content, including BDSM and hanging-induced ejaculation, leaked from a test screening, word got out: Fennell had made her film again.  

For some, writer-director-actor Fennell is one of the most exciting figures in contemporary cinema, an Oscar-winning visionary whose previous pictures, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, managed to say provocative and original things about gender, class and power while still remaining wholly entertaining. For her detractors, Fennell is a nepo baby one-trick pony who is only capable of making the kind of smirkingly superficial films that attract a great deal of attention and make her money without having anything to say about the weighty topics that she tackles. With her third film, the jury will finally return, and the verdict should be fascinating.  

Certainly, Warner Bros. has enormous faith in Wuthering Heights. The studio has invested $80 million in the budget – Netflix were reportedly prepared to pay $150 million, a ridiculous amount for a literary adaptation, but did not want to release the film theatrically – and forked out for none other than Charli xcx, the pop star du jour, to provide the songs for the picture. The first previews released suggest that Warner have something entirely inimitable on their hands, a strange and dreamlike mixture of swooning Gothic romance, with two of the hottest actors of the moment, and something post-modern and ironic. I was reminded of a similarly divisive film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which split audiences down the line on its release but still made a fortune at the box office.  

The studio will presumably be hoping that the reunion of Robbie and Fennell (who respectively starred and cameoed in Barbie) will be vastly successful. At a time when most period literary adaptations never make it to the cinema, Wuthering Heights is a rare beast, but even as we prepare for endless thinkpieces upon its release, there are a few encouraging signs. Robbie, who has not always been used well by Hollywood, looks too clean and wide-eyed as Cathy, but Elordi, who was a stiff presence in Saltburn, might well be about to capture Heathcliff’s mixture of brutality and magnetism.  

And the two Charli xcx songs released so far are both excellent. The first, ‘House,’ features none other than John Cale, reciting an increasingly disturbing spoken-word monologue over scraping viola, before the chorus “I think I’m going to die in this house” explodes in visceral fashion. The second, the more conventional ‘Chains of Love,’ is a perfectly judged pop song complete with old-school girl groups “oh-oh-ohs” in the chorus as Charli declares “The chains of love are cruel / I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner.” If they’re anything to go by tonally and thematically, Fennell’s film will be a decidedly modern and downbeat take on Brontë’s original, without the sappy romance of other, less demanding adaptations of the novel.  

Yet this could also be a false promise. Saltburn marketed itself as a hyper-aware take on Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley, which instead proved to be an excuse for Barry Keoghan’s charmless arriviste to kill people and dance around a big house naked. And Promising Young Woman was one of the least deserving Oscar-winners for best screenplay ever made, with a lazy, all-men-are-bastards premise that soon resulted in a misandrist twist that made the entire project a repellent one. So there is every chance that Wuthering Heights could be another artistic wash-out. But it could also be like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or even the don of all period films, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: a fascinating, breathtakingly original take on the material. Not long to go now, in any case, and then The Discourse will have its day. And until then, we’ll always have Kate Bush: “Heathcliff, it’s me! Cathy!” Etc, etc.