{"id":1952884,"date":"2025-08-10T18:23:43","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T18:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1952884"},"modified":"2025-08-10T18:23:43","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T18:23:43","slug":"a-woke-wuthering-heights-reboot-is-another-tedious-attempt-at-provocation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/a-woke-wuthering-heights-reboot-is-another-tedious-attempt-at-provocation\/","title":{"rendered":"A woke Wuthering Heights reboot is another tedious attempt at provocation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It is a truth \u2013 universally depressing \u2013 that directors who hate period novels always seem to end up adapting them. <\/p>\n

In recent years we\u2019ve had Steven Knight\u2019s degradation of Dickens\u2019s\u00a0Great Expectations<\/em>\u00a0which saw Mrs Havisham recast as a prostitute-hiring smackhead; the injection of a wildly unnecessary handjob into Jane Austen\u2019s unfinished\u00a0Sanditon<\/em>; and Netflix\u2019s Persuasion which replaces meditations on \u201cperpetual estrangement\u201d with the line: \u201cwe\u2019re worse than exes. We\u2019re friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

But these adaptory travesties look set to soon be topped. Emerald Fennell\u2019s new Wuthering Heights has been shown to its first test audience<\/a>. Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s masterpiece has, according to attendees, been transformed into a shockingly depraved, sex-obsessed, masturbatory romp.<\/p>\n

The film apparently opens with a public hanging in which the \u201ccondemned man ejaculates mid-execution\u201d before a nun \u201cfondles the corpse\u2019s visible erection.\u201d Later, it features light bondage as a woman is strapped into a horse\u2019s reins. Masturbation scenes are frequent and the camera repeatedly lingers on provocative shots of egg yolks running through outstretched fingers or dough being kneaded suggestively.<\/p>\n

What else should we expect from the director of Saltburn \u2013 her bath-water-orientated soft core\u00a0Brideshead\u00a0<\/em>reworking of two years ago? Wuthering Heights is hardly vanilla story to begin with, featuring scenes of domestic abuse, unimaginable cruelty, and moments of genuine terror. Did Fennell really read one of the greatest English novels and conclude it needed a bit more kink?<\/p>\n

The casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, has already made\u00a0clear<\/a>\u00a0her total disdain for both the work and its author. At the Sands film festival she mused that there is no need to be accurate as it is \u201cjust a book.\u201d Continuing, she admitted \u201cthere\u2019s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy,\u201d especially with the \u201cshocking\u201d set design, which may or may not feature a dog collar in some new offshoot of performative depravity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to imagine the production team salivating over this opportunity to send Bront\u00eb\u2019s work up in flames. The decision to launch the film in theatres on Valentines Day \u2013 as though as though they are dealing with a love story \u2013 is an obvious sign that Fennell has grasped the wrong end of the stick.<\/p>\n

Her confusion was clear from her casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw. No one can deny the erstwhile Barbie is a brilliant actor. But is a thirty-five-year-old blond Aussie the right woman to play a boyish, wild-eyed, teen brunette from Yorkshire? Cathy is fifteen years younger than Robbie is now when she dies at the end of the novel. If you were going to ignore her age, Kate Bush could at least have been lured out of her semi-retirement.<\/p>\n

Photographs from the set show Robbie in costume for Cathy\u2019s marriage to Linton. She is dressed in a white off-the-shoulder dress with puffed sleeves, a hoop skirt, and a sweeping veil anchored by a rather tacky tiara. Forget the fact that Queen Victoria would not popularise the white dress for several more decades. Maybe we can even overlook the question of where Cathy got such a statement outfit given that she\u2019s spent the prior five days locked up in Wuthering Heights resisting the forced marriage. But dressing her in such a hideous 1980s themed number suggests that Fennell\u2019s costume team have been more inspired by the action figure Robbie is used to playing rather than the book they have been set to adapt.<\/p>\n

Maybe I shouldn\u2019t care so much. But\u00a0Wuthering Heights<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t \u201cjust a book\u201d, and it certainly didn\u2019t need sexing up. It is an act of great hubris to think that you know better than Bront\u00eb. Believing you can improve her storytelling with a bit of masturbation and some equestrian themed BDSM is an act of supreme arrogance. No one forced Fennell to adapt it. If she wanted to make a kinky nineteenth-century bodice ripper that would have been fine. But why did she have to take a chainsaw to the English Canon in the process?<\/p>\n

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is a truth \u2013 universally depressing \u2013 that directors who hate period novels always seem to end up adapting them. In recent years we\u2019ve had Steven Knight\u2019s degradation of Dickens\u2019s\u00a0Great Expectations\u00a0which saw Mrs Havisham recast as a prostitute-hiring smackhead; the injection of a wildly unnecessary handjob into Jane Austen\u2019s unfinished\u00a0Sanditon; and Netflix\u2019s Persuasion which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1952885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[331148,340958,310836,340957],"class_list":["post-1952884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-emerald-fennell","tag-emily-bronte","tag-margot-robbie","tag-wuthering-heights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/A-woke-Wuthering-Heights-reboot-is-another-tedious-attempt-at.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1952884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1952885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1952884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1952884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1952884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}