Wuthering Heights adaptation starring Margot Robbie described as ‘aggressively provocative’ in test screenings

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Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation is already dividing viewers after a test screening audience branded the film “sexually explicit” and “tonally abrasive”.

According to movie news site World of Reel, the retelling of Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic novel, which stars Barbie’s Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi as her brooding love interest Heathcliff, features several explicit scenes and significantly deviates from the source material.

One audience member at the first test screening for the film in Dallas, who described the film as “aggressively provocative”, said it had parallels with the “stylised depravity” seen in director Fennell’s provocative 2023 dark comedy Saltburn.

The film reportedly opens with a public hanging that descends into absurdity when the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”. This apparently sends the onlooking crowd into an “orgiastic frenzy”, prompting a nun to “fondle the corpse’s visible erection”.

One attendee said there are scenes of “purposefully discomforting masturbation”, a sexual bondage encounter involving horse reins and shots of “suggestive textures”, such as egg yolks, bread dough and slug trails.

You might expect nothing less from Fennell, a director known for pushing the envelope. Her last film, Saltburn, saw Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver Quick drink the bathwater of Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton.

World of Reel writer Jordan Ruimy said it was “the most unusual Wuthering Heights” ever. “What the next film version called for was a jolt of fresh energy, something bold and unexpected. For better or worse, it seems that’s exactly what Emerald Fennell may have brought to the table.”

The new movie, which will arrive in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, has already been hit with criticism from Brontë fans after pictures emerged of Robbie wearing an Eighties-style wedding dress on the set of the film.

The casting of Elordi as Heathcliff was criticised in particular, since the character is described in the book as having dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin.

While history shows that the miscasting of Heathcliff in film or TV adaptations is nothing new – the character has been played by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy and even Cliff Richard – Elordi’s casting has still raised eyebrows.

Another criticism from Brontë readers is that Elordi, 28, and Robbie, 35, are the wrong ages, as their characters are teenagers for much of the book’s plot. However, the character Mr Lockwood also meets Heathcliff 20 years later, when he is around 40.

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‘Saltburn’ director Emerald Fennell is behind the forthcoming ‘Wuthering Heights’ adaptation (Getty Images for Loewe)

The film’s casting director Kharmel Cochrane has since said that if people are offended by the casting decisions, then the set design is “even more shocking”.

“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” Cochrane said at the Sands Film Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, according to Deadline.

“But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.

“There’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy. Wait until you see the set design, because that is even more shocking. And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.”

Brontë’s novel follows the relationship between the two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, in rural Yorkshire around 1770, and the tumultuous relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan fostered by her father.