All posts tagged: Fennells

What Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Gets Right About 18th Century Sex

What Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Gets Right About 18th Century Sex

Published by Sam Flores

Whether you loved it or you hated it, Emerald Fennell’s sexually-charged reimagining of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – featuring a brooding Jacob Elordi – still has us all talking over a week after its cinematic release. While the original 1847 novel didn’t feature any sex scenes, Fennell’s film is far more ‘Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’m horny.’ But for all the sneaking out of bedroom windows, romping in carriages, grinding in the moors, finger sucking and… puppy play that Fennell portrays in her take of Wuthering Heights, how much of this raunchery was actually going on during the period in which the original novel was set? When you think of sexy periods of time in history, we tend to think of the promiscuity of the Ancient Romans or even the more recent free love movement of the 1970s – not the late Georgian era. So before we all start wishing that we could jump in a time machine to 1770 and find our own Heathcliff to romp about the moors with, we asked leading …

Wuthering Heights reactions: How Emerald Fennell’s divisive adaptation tore the Independent’s culture desk apart

Wuthering Heights reactions: How Emerald Fennell’s divisive adaptation tore the Independent’s culture desk apart

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Brexit. JFK’s assassination. That blue and black or white and gold dress. All vaguely impressive sources of debate, but sorely lacking in the drama and volatility of The Independent culture desk’s first few days in a post-Wuthering Heights world. Emerald Fennell’s grass-eating, dough-molesting bodice-ripper – “adapted” “loosely” from Emily Brontë’s literary touchstone – has been the canary in the coal mine for our offices here, helping surface long-standing tensions and sharpening inter-desk rivalries. No, I kid. We’ve all just really, really disagreed with one another on it, Fennell comfortably reaffirming her position as the most divisive filmmaker currently working. Questions are constant. “Was Margot Robbie supposed to act like that?”; “Jacob Elordi gold tooth – yay or nay?”; “Did I enjoy Wuthering Heights or …

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is controversial – but Brontë’s novel has been shocking people for 178 years

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is controversial – but Brontë’s novel has been shocking people for 178 years

Published by Daniella Wilson

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in recent months, you’ll notice that Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights has caused its fair share of controversy. But it’s worth noting that this is a story that has outraged and intrigued people ever since its initial publication in 1847. Speaking to RadioTimes.com, Juliet Barker, author of The Brontës, Lucasta Miller, author of The Brontë Myth, and Claire O’Callaghan, Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies – the official journal of the Brontë Society – talked us through the shocking past of the text. “The scenes of violence, they’re so graphic that they almost go beyond realism,” explained Miller. “Which is why I don’t think they can really be represented on screen unless it became a Tarantino-esque cartoon. “If you imagine literally portraying on-screen a grown man rubbing a child’s wrist up and down on a broken window until the blood runs down. People would be running out of the cinemas.” The 2026 movie – out in cinemas today – retains an element of that shock factor. O’Callaghan, who …

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is a reader’s dream

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is a reader’s dream

Published by Sam Flores

In the months leading up to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s beloved novel “Wuthering Heights,” one rumor about the writer-director’s new version of the classic story took hold among the public. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed that, in the film’s poster and its trailers, the title was bookended by quotation marks. Some theorized that it was merely an homage to vintage movie posters, pointing out that the posters depict the film’s two leads, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, embracing in a “Gone with the Wind”-esque pose. Others speculated that, due to Fennell’s penchant for audience provocation, the quotation marks were an Easter egg indicating that her take on Brontë’s novel would be far from your great-great-grandmother’s “Wuthering Heights.” Before long, it became a common assumption among the chronically online that Fennell’s version would reveal itself to be from the point of view of a woman — perhaps Victorian, perhaps in another era altogether — reading the book for the first time, its twisted love story playing out in her head and onto the silver screen. Done …

19 changes Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights makes from the book

19 changes Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights makes from the book

Published by Daniella Wilson

In case you missed it, the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights is stirring up some controversy. The classic novel by Emily Brontë has been adapted for the screen countless times, and now provocative director and writer Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) has taken on the challenge of bringing her version to the screen. The film, as many will be aware, charts the dramatic love story of Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) as they are raised together on the majestic Yorkshire moors in Victorian England and develop a connection which cannot be denied. Speaking to Fandango, Fennell said: “The thing for me is that you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible.”In fact, this has been given as the explanation for the film’s title being stylised as “Wuthering Heights” with quotation marks.The backlash from many Brontë purists was swift and unrelenting once marketing started for the film and shows little sign of abating now that the …

Wuthering Heights review | Emerald Fennell’s revamp will almost certainly provoke pearl-clutching

Wuthering Heights review | Emerald Fennell’s revamp will almost certainly provoke pearl-clutching

Published by Daniella Wilson

Wuthering Heights is in cinemas from 13 February. Add it to your watchlist Emily Brontë’s gothic romance gets a radical revamp in this sizzling, amusing and stormy new screen adaptation from Saltburn’s Emerald Fennell, who bagged an Original Screenplay Oscar for her attention-grabbing 2020 debut Promising Young Woman. Casting Hollywood’s hottest properties, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, as her leads, writer/director Fennell presents us with a version that’s unapologetically her own vision, lopping off the second half of the story and sexing things up to the max. We see how the young Heathcliff and Cathy (Adolescence’s Owen Cooper and Charlotte Mellington) are thrown together when Heathcliff is taken in by Cathy’s father Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), who saves him from being savaged in the street by a man who may or may not be Heathcliff’s own father. It’s not long before the drunken Earnshaw is treating the boy roughly, but Heathcliff and Cathy become thick as thieves, a bond which grows into something all-consumingly romantic as they age. This connection is severed, apparently for good, …

Wuthering Heights Reviews: Emerald Fennell’s Film Gets Strong Reactions From Critics

Wuthering Heights Reviews: Emerald Fennell’s Film Gets Strong Reactions From Critics

Published by Sam Flores

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights One of the year’s most-anticipated films is almost here, with critics having now weighed in on the new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s take on the much-loved gothic novel arrives in cinemas later this week, just in time for Valentine’s Day, with Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie taking on the iconic roles of Heathcliff and Cathy. Monday night saw Wuthering Heights premiering on Rotten Tomatoes with a critical score of 71%, indicating pretty positive reviews overall. The bad news? Well, the more negative responses have really gone in, with one and two stars in The Independent, The Guardian and The Times, respectively. Here’s a selection of what critics have had to say about Wuthering Heights so far, starting with some of the more glowing reviews… BBC Culture (4/5) “Fennell channels something essential in the book – the corrosive behaviour that can result from thwarted desire. Jealousy, anger and vengeance are as natural to Cathy and Heathcliff as their endless passion for each other. If …

Wuthering Heights review – Emerald Fennell’s astonishingly bad adaptation is like a limp Mills & Boon

Wuthering Heights review – Emerald Fennell’s astonishingly bad adaptation is like a limp Mills & Boon

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Our modern literacy crisis has found a new figurehead in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. It’s Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic for a culture that’s denigrated literature to the point where it’s no longer intended to expand the mind but to distract it. With its title stylised in quotation marks, and a director’s statement that it’s intended to capture her experience of reading the book aged 14, it uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable. Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work. Some of this, it can be argued, was already signalled by the film’s casting and the choice to obliterate any mention of race, colonialism, or ostracisation in the telling of pseudo-siblings Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive codependence. Heathcliff, …