If you’ve still yet to fully recover from Saltburn ’s bathtub scene, then it’s perhaps best to look away now: Oscar-winning provocateur Emerald Fennell has set her sights on her next project, and her choice – and casting – is sure to be divisive. On 12 July, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights , and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell”.
Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.
Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession – the former about one student’s infatuation with another, and the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend – the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense. However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation, or a modern-day update? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson? Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and scr.