“Drive me mad.” This is what the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” promised, before showing Jacob Elordi licking a flesh-coloured wall, wet dough being slapped, and Margot Robbie moaning on the moors. Its statement was clear: this won’t be a fusty adaptation, this will deliver sex on a silver platter.
Then came the press tour. By then, we were no strangers to overblown campaigns. It wasn’t that long ago that we were rolling our eyes over Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo earnestly holding each other’s fingernails during the Wicked rollout, or that we were champing at the bit for more saucy details around the rumoured affair between Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell ahead of Anyone But You. But the “Wuthering Heights” media blitz appeared on another level.
Robbie and Elordi, our new Cathy and Heathcliff, showed off matching rings featuring skeletons in an “eternal” embrace and the phrase “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (a line from the book/film). Now, these two aren’t actually together. In fact, Robbie recently had a baby with her husband of nine years, Tom Ackerley.
But we didn’t hear much about that during the publicity round. Instead, we heard that Elordi would watch Robbie closely on set, even if he wasn’t in the scene. When he wasn’t there, Robbie would supposedly feel “lost, like a kid without their blanket”. We discovered the co-stars’ “mutual obsession” with each other, and the time Elordi filled Robbie’s room with Valentine’s Day roses.
As insulting as it is to have fake passion shoved in our faces to form parasocial bonds, its message remained consistent: “Wuthering Heights” will be sexy as hell.
So, after all that foreplay, did it go off with a bang?
Sorry, Brontë purists, but it did. The film is basically 2½ hours of drenched shirts, heaving bosoms and fingers in mouths. This is peppered with light BDSM (a horse bridle may be used at one point), voyeurism and a slew of suggestive imagery, such as Robbie shoving her finger into a jellied fish mouth. There’s nothing quite as titillating as forbidden lust, a fact made evident when Cathy and Heathcliff practically swallow each other whole right in front of the former’s husband, concealed only by the dark of night.
The movie centres on the flesh, beginning in violence (Heathcliff being whipped by Cathy’s father), shifting to steamy passion (the aforementioned make-out sessions), and then ending as all fleshy things do. The body and its carnal desires are everywhere, even on Cathy’s bedroom walls, which replicate her skin – veins, freckles and all – walls that Heathcliff later licks in a moment of raw lust.
Such sexual frankness is expected from Fennell, the director who brought us the notorious bathtub scene in Saltburn. However, the film’s raunch isn’t what sells it. Rather, it’s the palpable chemistry between its stars. Granted, it helps that both Robbie and Elordi are impossibly attractive and therefore don’t look like wet rats when making out in the rain (something they do a lot). Their beauty only takes them so far, though, the rest being carried by their longing looks, playful banter and small acts of kindness, like Elordi holding his hands over Robbie’s eyes to shield them from the rain.
And when they finally “do the deed” (in a carriage, in the moors, in her bedroom … they get around), it’s what is unseen that’s most tantalising. This isn’t a 19th century Heated Rivalry – neither star is seen fully undressed. We merely see bows undone and skirts lifted, allowing our (likely filthier) imaginations to do the rest.
The press tour was exaggerated, but the product backs it up. Watching the movie, it’s difficult to believe these two aren’t genuinely yearning for each other’s touch.
I know what some of you may be thinking: “Their relationship is too problematic to be sexy!” Yes, they grew up as siblings of sorts after Cathy’s father brought Heathcliff in as a servant. And beyond the quasi-incestuousness of it all, their love is rooted in co-dependence and destruction, blurring the lines between love, obsession and abuse. They’re often violent with each other, manipulative, untrusting. They use others, such as Cathy’s husband’s ward, as pawns in their toxic game of cat-and-mouse.
But as controversial as this is, it’s precisely what the press tour promised. Elordi himself said he and Robbie were obsessed with each other, and admitted to a degree of co-dependence. This is Cathy and Heathcliff to a tee: “Kiss me and let us both be damned,” Heathcliff says at one point in the film.
The campaign guaranteed sex, which we got in spades, but it was also nodding to the corrosive passion, the uglier side of thwarted desire, underlying it. Sure, it was beyond cringe watching Robbie and Elordi fake-swoon over each other in interviews, but at least it remained true to the toxic, sex-fuelled fever dream ahead.
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Nell Geraets is a Culture and Lifestyle reporter at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.