You could say this trailer is getting ribbed for your pleasure.
The teaser trailer for a new “Wuthering Heights” film dropped on Wednesday, and its gratuitously sexual vibes are inspiring a whole lot of hilarious snark online.
Fennell’s film is an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, which centers on the romance between Heathcliff (played by Elordi) and his teenage foster sister, Catherine Earnshaw (Robbie), that eventually descends into cruelty and bitterness.
Fans of the book found glaring inconsistencies between the source material and the trailer, and particularly took issue with the casting. Robbie, who plays Catherine, is far older than the book’s protagonist. Some fans also took issue with Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff. Although Heathcliff’s race is never explicitly stated in the novel, he is described as “dark-skinned,” and scholars have debated his ethnicity. The character was portrayed as Black in a 2011 film adaptation.
Fans also fear that the book’s themes — like violence and cruelty, social class, race and ethnicity — will be “whitewashed” in favor of tantalizing shots of its two sexy leads. The new film is set for release on Valentine’s Day.
Fennell’s 2023 film “Saltburn” was criticized for resembling 1999’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” without its substance, so social media users were ready with some pretty brutal jabs about “Wuthering Heights.”
“I appreciate that ‘Wuthering Heights’ is in quotations on the title card,” one Reddit user joked. “Sort of signifying to us that- ‘this is technically Wuthering Heights but not really.’”
“Brontë but make it brat,” another Redditor joked.
“I love the part where Heathcliff says ‘it’s wuthering time’ and wuthers all over Catherine,” another commenter on YouTube said.
“I wish the internet didn’t exist just to see the essays on the book from the students that only watched this movie,” another YouTuber moaned.
X users also had a lot of funny things to say about the film, below:
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