Emerald Fennell is not your enemy.
This may be a strange and foreign idea for some to parse, but it’s true nonetheless. Despite popular opinion, the filmmaker behind “Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn,” and her latest movie, a loose and playful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, “Wuthering Heights,” is not out to get the audience. Yet, Fennell’s penchant for narrative subversion and her almost teenage-like preoccupation with sex, drugs and perverse paraphernalia continues to alienate a growing portion of very vocal, very agitated viewers. And with the polarizing and extreme response to Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” it seems this animosity has reached its crest. There are opinion pieces galore claiming Fennell “got it all wrong,” video essays asserting that the film is “the worst adaptation of all time” and that Fennell should “apologize to Emily Brontë.” (How one would go about apologizing to the ghost of a 19th-century writer is beyond me.) And those don’t even scratch the surface of the sentiments being tossed around on social media. If one is random, two is a coincidence and three is a pattern, then this third round of divisive reception confirms that Fennell’s work will be continually met with raised eyebrows and closed minds no matter how good — or, more importantly, how interesting — her films are.
