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 scraggly mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, at least on that front, we now have some answers: on 23 September, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but – staggeringly – his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie , now the world’s most ubiquitous blonde after Barbie herself, would (presumably) be going brunette to embody his tormented paramour.
The latter will also be producing through her company, LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too. It’s not yet clear who else will be filling out the predictably starry ensemble (personally, I hope Carey Mulligan makes an appearance again, as she has in Fennell’s past two hits, in some bonkers and unexpected role), though we do know that Fennell will be writing and producing as well as directing, and that the film is already in pre-production ahead of a UK-based shoot in 2025. So, I say to my fellow Brontë obsessives: this is not a drill.
It’s time to blast Kate Bush and dig out your own battered copy of this literary classic once again..
