Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Just Had Its First Test Screening, And It Sounds Absolutely Wild

Warning: This article contains potential spoilers for Emerald Fennell’s next film Wuthering Heights.

After capturing the whole world’s attention with her murderous, grave-humping, drain-sucking, nude-dancing Saltburn, British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s latest big-screen offering sounds even more outrageous.

Last summer, it was revealed that Emerald was turning her hand to a new adaptation of the classic gothic novel Wuthering Heights, which raised eyebrows for a variety of reasons during production.

Earlier this week, World Of Reel published a piece claiming that the Oscar winner’s take on Wuthering Heights had received its first audience test screening in Dallas, Texas, with the first cinemagoers to see it apparently being split right down the middle.

World Of Reel’s article claims the movie is “far more explicit than any previous adaptation” of the Emily Brontë book, specifically naming an opening scene in which a hanged man ejaculates mid-execution “sending the onlooking crowd into a kind of orgiastic frenzy” with a nun even getting hands-on with the man’s body after he’s killed.

Apparently there are also multiple sequences of masturbation, and another in which a woman is “strapped into a horse’s reins for a BDSM-tinged encounter”, as well as other lingering shots that are more “suggestive” in nature than outright explicit.

The film is reported to lean heavily into the “shock value” of Emerald’s previous big-screen offerings, and has been described as “aggressively provocative”, “tonally abrasive” and “deliberately unromantic”.

To all of that, all we can say is… bring it on – although given how polarised the audience reaction was at this first test screening, it remains to be seen whether all of that material will make it into the final cut.

Notably, after many critics were alarmed at certain historical inconsistencies and variants from the source material, World Of Reel also claimed that the film “diverges significantly from the source material”.

HuffPost UK has contacted representatives for Emerald Fennell and Warner Bros., the production company distributing Wuthering Heights, for comment.

Wuthering Heights will feature Margot Robbie – with whom Emerald briefly starred alongside in Barbie – and Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi in the lead roles of Catherine and Heathcliffe.

It was previously revealed that the film will also feature the Netflix drama Adolescence’s breakout star Owen Cooper in a supporting role.

Wuthering Heights is currently slated for release in February 2026.