Pop pulse meets Brontë’s fury: a first look at Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights
The first teaser for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights wastes no time. Storm-lashed moors, breathless close-ups, and a bruised love story take center stage as Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi lock into the kind of chemistry that looks both magnetic and dangerous. The clip is brief, but it draws a clear line: this isn’t a corseted Valentine. It’s a fever.
The surprise is the sound. Original songs from Charli XCX drive the teaser, a sharp, modern counterpoint to the 1847 classic. It’s a risky blend—contemporary pop inside a period drama—but the tone clicks with Fennell’s style: elegant on the surface, feral underneath. The music hits like a heartbeat, underscoring the story’s obsession and cruelty rather than softening it.
Fennell writes and directs, returning to the themes that powered Promising Young Woman and Saltburn: desire without guardrails, power games, and the fallout that lingers long after the pleasure fades. The teaser leans into those instincts. We get the bleak beauty of the Yorkshire moors, but the imagery is less postcard than pressure cooker—faces half-lit, rooms too small, voices that sound like confession and threat. It looks like a classic told at body temperature.
Robbie and Elordi lead as the story’s tortured lovers, and the teaser sells their push-pull right away. Robbie’s intensity reads as willful and wary; Elordi meets it with a quiet, coiled charge. Neither looks safe to the other, which is the point. Wuthering Heights isn’t a gentle romance. It’s a story about love that corrodes, power that festers, and the way resentment can echo through a house for generations.
The ensemble signals range beyond the central couple. Hong Chau, fresh off an Oscar nomination for The Whale and a turn in The Menu, brings precise menace when needed. Shazad Latif (Star Trek: Discovery, Toast of London) adds flint to any room he’s in. Alison Oliver (Conversations with Friends) has a knack for fragile surfaces that crack at the right moment. Martin Clunes (Doc Martin) and Ewan Mitchell (House of the Dragon) round out a lineup built for tension, not comfort.
Fennell is producing through LuckyChap Entertainment alongside Margot Robbie and Josey McNamara, marking another collaboration for the team behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. The track record matters: those films married sharp aesthetics with thorny subject matter and found audiences willing to sit with discomfort. Expect that same calibration here—glossy craft aimed at jagged feelings.
On the score, Anthony Willis returns for his third straight feature with Fennell after Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. His orchestral work will share space with Charli XCX’s original songs, which suggests a layered soundscape: sweeping strings for old wounds, synths for new ones. That split mirrors the film’s likely balance—respect for the source with a present-day pulse.
The teaser doesn’t spell out character names or plot points, and that restraint helps. Even if you’ve read Emily Brontë’s novel, the promise here is mood and motive rather than chapter-by-chapter fidelity. The core remains: an all-consuming bond that curdles into vengeance, class hierarchies that deform people in private, and a house—Wuthering Heights—that holds every secret like damp air.
Warner Bros. dated the movie for February 13, 2026, the Friday of Valentine’s Day weekend. That’s a bold bit of counterprogramming. The book is a love story, yes, but one that leaves claw marks. The slot says the studio wants couples and curiosity seekers, not just literature faithful. It also gives the film room to run without summer-movie noise and to build conversation on tone and performances.
Strategically, the package checks a lot of boxes. Robbie is coming off a pop-culture juggernaut in Barbie and remains a draw on the producing side with LuckyChap. Elordi’s profile has surged with Euphoria, Priscilla, and Saltburn. Fennell is an Academy Award winner for Promising Young Woman’s screenplay and has shown she can pull sharp work from actors while keeping pace on social media, music, and fashion cycles that amplify a film’s presence.
Charli XCX’s involvement also makes business sense. Pop-driven soundtracks can widen a film’s reach and live beyond release weekend. Think Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette—period pieces that felt current because the music refused to behave. Charli’s recent run has shown a knack for turning glossy hooks into cultural chatter. Here, the songs aren’t decoration; they’re part of the film’s argument about desire and danger.
For readers brushing up on the source, Wuthering Heights tracks a love so intense it turns vindictive, poisoning two households until nobody walks away clean. Brontë’s novel is famously untidy—cruel, mournful, and resisting easy romance—and that rough edge is what has kept filmmakers coming back. Past screen versions have taken different routes: the 1939 William Wyler film folded the story into sweeping Hollywood tragedy; the 1992 adaptation with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche leaned into old-school passion; Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take stripped it to raw earth, breath, and weather. Fennell’s teaser suggests a new lane: period form with modern blood pressure.
Visually, what we glimpse signals high contrast—wind whipping hair and fabric, candlelit close-ups, and a camera that sticks uncomfortably close when voices drop. Costumes read grounded rather than ornamental. No frames scream “museum.” The effect is intimacy first, heritage second.
What we don’t know yet is just as interesting: the film’s rating, how far it will chase the novel’s generational sprawl, and where the line sits between score and songs. Will the soundtrack arrive ahead of the movie to build a pop runway? Will the full trailer confirm who’s playing which role and how much the script reorders Brontë’s timeline? Those pieces will set expectations for awards chatter versus pure box office play.
A modern soundtrack for a brutal love story
Music has been central to Fennell’s filmmaking. Promising Young Woman used bright, familiar songs to sharpen its cruelty; Saltburn turned classic cues and dance-floor tracks into memory triggers. Folding Charli XCX into this world tightens that relationship between sound and story. It hints at a film that wants to feel like a bruise that throbs—seen, heard, and hard to forget.
Anthony Willis’s presence steadies the mix. His past scores with Fennell know when to swell and when to step back, letting silence do the work. Pair that with Charli’s hooks and you get a sonic palette that can swing from ache to adrenaline within a scene. In a tale built on longing and retaliation, that range isn’t a flourish; it’s narrative muscle.
For now, the teaser does what it should. It introduces a world, stakes a tone, and hands the film a headline-grabbing musical identity. If the feature sticks to the promise on display—a gothic romance that stings more than it soothes—Valentine’s weekend just got a little darker.
