An early test showing of the forthcoming Brontë adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi reveals film features horse rein sex, suggestive egg yolks and necrophile nuns
Equal parts intrigue and scepticism had already dogged the forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights from Emerald Fennell – whose first two films, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, displayed a love of mordant and explicit envelope-pushing.
As reported by World of Reel, a first test screening for the film, which stars Margot Robbie and Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi, took place earlier this week in Dallas, and audience reaction was “mixed”.
One attender described the film as “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive” and suggested it strongly recalled the “stylised depravity” of Saltburn with scenes of “clinical masturbation”, a bondage-tinged sexual encounter involving horse reins and less conventional romance or emotional complexity than many aficionados of Emily Brontë’s novel might expect.
The film apparently opens with a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”. The crowd react orgiastically, and a nun “fondles the corpse’s visible erection”.
