An early test screening for her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — starring Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria) — has reportedly received mixed reviews, and even a significant amount of negative reactions.
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Director Emerald Fennell hooked her audiences with her first two films: Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. While the former may have received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the latter pushed the envelope even further, to the point that her audience now expects it.
A blog titled World of Reel reported that it spoke with some of the attendees after the screening. One person at the screening said the movie was “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive,” and that “leans hard into Fennell’s now-familiar brand of stylized depravity.” According to this attendee, the movie was a “deliberately unromantic take on Brontë’s novel, stripped of emotional nuance and full of salacious detours that serve shock value.”
Fennell’s “stylized depravity” comes in the form of multiple scenes that seemed to be included for shock factor. “The film opens with a public hanging that quickly descends into grotesque absurdity, as the condemned man ejaculates mid-execution, sending the onlooking crowd into a kind of orgiastic frenzy,” the blog writes. ” A nun even fondles the corpse’s visible erection.”
But it doesn’t stop there, according to the publication, there was a BDSM-tinged encounter with a woman tied up in horse reins, several masturbation scenes, suggestive scenes including egg yolks, bread kneading, and a slug.
Attendees also told World of Reel that the unbalanced movie couldn’t even be saved by either Robbie nor Elordi. The two actors had great chemistry, the writer explains, but “the characters they portray are so cold and unlikable that even strong acting can’t create a point of connection. And I ask in return: isn’t that precisely what Brontë intended?”
It seems to be one of Fennell’s most caustic films yet, and by the sound of the screen test attendees’ accounts, the blog writes, “it sounds like the most unusual Wuthering Heights to date, and that might not be a bad thing.”
This article originally appeared on Out: Jacob Elordi & Margot Robbie’s new film described as ‘hyper-sexualized’
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