The first trailer of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s controversial version of Wuthering Heights dropped this week, promising an erotic take on the Emily Bronte classic.

The brooding teaser features a topless Elordi working outdoors, bread being suggestively kneaded and lots of fingers in mouths.

Critics have noted the footage also suggests “suppressed sexual urges”, with corsets being tightened and lingering shots of the main characters in what appears to be “more overt in its eroticism than the 1847 gothic novel”.

The latest adaptation of the classic tale is directed by British filmmaker Emerald Fennell, who won an Oscar for Promising Young Woman in 2021 and went on to the 2023 erotic thriller Saltburn, which went viral with scenes involving bathtubs and full frontal nudity.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights reportedly received mixed reactions from an early test screening last month, with some viewers allegedly complaining it was “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive”.

One scene reportedly included a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”.

The movie has also faced a backlash from Wuthering Heights purists over the casting of Australian actors Robbie and Elordi as lead characters Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff.

Many have claimed that the blonde-haired Robbie, 35, is unsuitable to portray dark-haired teenager Cathy, while Heathcliff, played by the tall and pale Elordi, 28, is described as being dark-skinned in Bronte’s novel.

Robbie plays teenager Cathy Earnshaw in the latest adaptation. Photo: Warner Bros

In the online response to leaked stills from the shooting of the movie last September, Bronte fans described the casting as “disappointing”, “terrible” and “bizarre”.

The Independent newspaper’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey even asked: “Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this?”

Casting director Karmel Cochrane defended the Elordi decision in an interview with movie site Deadline earlier this year saying while the movie was based on the book, “it’s all art”.

“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” she said. “But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”

During a promotional tour for another project, Elordi, who also starred in Saltburn, told Deadline: “It’s an incredible romance, it’s a true epic, it’s visually beautiful. The script is beautiful, the costumes are incredible.”

A story of passion and revenge, Wuthering Heights tells the story of the obsessive, destructive love between Cathy and Heathcliff.

While the film will not be released until Valentine’s Day 2026, billboards promoting it have already appeared in Britain and the US with the tagline “drive me mad”.

There have been more than a dozen movie adaptations of Wuthering Heights, not all using the book’s title and many in languages other than English.

Laurence Olivier was in his 30s when he played Heathcliff in the classic 1939 film of the novel, which also featured Merle Oberon in her late 20s as Cathy.

Juliette Binoche was approaching 30 when she played Cathy alongside a 30-year-old Ralph Fiennes in a 1992 version.

The original book also inspired Kate Bush’s chart topping 1978 song of the same name, recorded when she was just 18.