Wuthering Heights has the world on tenterhooks. Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of Emily Brontë’s windswept classic is set to push the boundaries of the period drama, weaving together gloriously over-the-top set design with whimsical costuming, playful world building, a winking humor, and no-holds-barred melodrama like we’ve never seen before.
What films inspired this big, bold swing? Well, according to leading lady Margot Robbie, they include the likes of The Notebook, The English Patient, and Titanic—unapologetically epic romances that sweep you off your feet. But, there are many, many more.
To that end, Fennell has now curated a very special program for the BFI: Love Stories, a set of supremely stylish films that influenced the Oscar winner’s soon-to-be cult classic, four of which will be screened at London’s BFI IMAX in February, in honor of Wuthering Heights’s release on February 13. (The BFI will also host Emerald Fennell in Conversation at BFI Southbank on February 4, where the director will discuss her filmmaking process.)
“Since its publication 200 years ago, critics have challenged Wuthering Heights’s validity as a love story,” Fennell said in a statement shared by the BFI. “It is too shocking, too cruel, too narratively strange to slip neatly into the world of romance, but it is a love story nonetheless. While researching it, I rewatched many of my own favorite ‘love stories,’ ones that challenged, subverted, even obliterated the conventions of the genre. These are stories which put the love story under duress, which stick a needle into the strawberry trifle, which show love in all its freakish, gory detail.”
Browse her full list of love stories below, and make sure to work your way through them before you catch Wuthering Heights.
Random Harvest (1942)
In wide-brimmed hats, sharp-shouldered power suits, and ruffled blouses, the luminous Greer Garson is the singer who enchants Ronald Colman’s tormented war veteran in Mervyn LeRoy’s swooning adaptation of the epic James Hilton novel of the same name—a delightfully preposterous tale of amnesia, double lives, and long-awaited reconciliation. A forgotten classic.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
The Powell and Pressburger romantic fantasia remains irresistible: after David Niven’s fighter pilot survives the impossible jump from his burning plane, the bureaucratic error that spared his life—the heavenly emissary sent to escort him to the next world was derailed by a thick fog —must be corrected. Cue a surreal climb up a seemingly endless staircase to heaven to make his case for remaining on earth, alongside his love, Kim Hunter’s sweet-natured American radio operator. Visually stunning, outrageously ambitious, and ultimately transcendent, there’s nothing else quite like it.
Far From the Madding Crowd (1967)
Thomas Hardy’s blustery romance has been transported to the screen countless times, with Carey Mulligan most recently portraying the steely Bathsheba Everdene. But this retelling from John Schlesinger, starring a ringletted Julie Christie, is still a staple —all sweeping landscapes, a glamorous cottagecore wardrobe, and a kind of swashbuckling swagger that the new Wuthering Heights should have in spades, too. Bonus points for all the steamy bodice-ripping.
Peau d’âne (1970)
If you love Jacques Demy’s dreamy, eye-popping The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort but have somehow not yet seen this madcap fairytale (its English title is Donkey Skin), correct that immediately. Centered on Catherine Deneuve’s wonderfully cartoonish princess—voluminous ballgowns, retina-searing jewels, a panto-esque energy—it sees her flee her magical kingdom (wearing a donkey head, naturally) in order to avoid being forced to marry her own father. Wacky original songs and a very camp fairy godmother (Delphine Seyrig) add to the general chaos.
The Night Porter (1974)
More than half a century on, controversy still swirls around Liliana Cavani’s boundary-pushing erotic thriller. In it, a scintillating, leather gloves-clad Charlotte Rampling is a concentration camp survivor who runs into her former torturer (Dirk Bogarde), previously a Nazi SS officer, in ’50s Vienna. Their sadomasochistic relationship leads to an all-consuming obsession, murder, and the potential for betrayal. As gripping as it is profoundly disturbing.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Gary Oldman as a top hat and sunglasses-wearing Dracula; an angelic, 21-year-old Winona Ryder as the object of his affection; a fresh-faced Keanu Reeves as her clean-cut husband; Anthony Hopkins as a grizzled Van Helsing; Sadie Frost, in her big-screen debut, as a fanged, Elizabethan ruff-sporting vampire; and a sexy, blood-soaked Monica Bellucci as one of Dracula’s brides—Francis Ford Coppola’s Gothic horror really has it all, including bonkers costuming, head-spinning visuals, and the manic energy Wuthering Heights surely aspires to.
Crash (1996)
Before we had Julia Ducournau’s Titane, there was David Cronenberg’s sultry and provocative exploration of an illicit automobile-related obsession. James Spader is the car crash victim who develops a fetish for collisions, diving head-first into a gruesome world of kinky fantasies, death-defying stunts, mysterious hit-and-runs, and mangled wrecks.
“As certain to cause arguments in the lobby as any film out there,” is how Fennell describes it in her statement via the BFI. “Ice-cold, Brechtian, camp as hell, gorgeous in a profoundly inhuman way. The desire to connect taken to its bleakest point and left on the side of the motorway to die.” Say no more.
Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Another film due to be shown is Baz Luhrmann’s baroque, bedazzled Shakespearean tragedy, one of the key influences for Wuthering Heights. “This film subverted what an adaptation could look like,” Fennell adds. “Iconoclastic, funny, beautiful, heartbreaking, it blew the dust off the source material like a hurricane.” From Leonardo DiCaprio’s floppy-haired, armor-clad hero and Claire Danes’s winged heroine to that ’90s soundtrack, the fish tank, brutal shoot-outs, and Harold Perrineau’s barnstorming Mercutio, it can’t be bettered.
The End of the Affair (1999)
In the smoke-filled, martini-laden parlors of ’40s London, a novelist (Ralph Fiennes) encounters his alluring former mistress (Julianne Moore) in Neil Jordan’s ravishing take on Graham Greene. The rekindling of their forbidden passions, as well as their delicate piecing together of what drove them apart the last time, is exquisite to behold.
Romance (1999)
In this fascinating study of female masochism, transgressive French filmmaker Catherine Breillat homes in on Caroline Ducey’s deceptively meek primary school teacher, trapped in a stagnant relationship, in this graphic shocker. A quest for sexual autonomy follows, via bondage, dissatisfying trysts, chiselled hunks, and a recreational sadist in the form of her middle-aged principal. With its genuinely WTF ending and unrestrained approach, it’s a classically Emerald Fennell choice.
Bluebeard (2009)
Also from Breillat, this menacing period piece reimagines the myth of the titular nobleman who murders his wives (a terrifying Dominique Thomas), as seen through the eyes of his latest fragile child bride (the enchanting Lola Créton). Dense with mystery, lavishly rendered, and full of surprises, it’s a transfixing fever dream.
The Handmaiden (2016)
The director’s cut of Park Chan-wook’s seductive South Korean classic will also be on show at the BFI IMAX. “A spectacular adaptation of a spectacular book, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, The Handmaiden opens itself up slowly and to devastatingly sexy effect,” says Fennell. “A magic trick of a film that only gets cleverer the closer you look at it.” There’s no arguing with that —masterfully constructed and immaculately shot, this tale of a 1930s Japanese heiress (the ethereal Kim Min-hee) and her Korean handmaiden (a quietly watchful Kim Tae-ri) is an icy cold and then blisteringly hot treat.
The Beguiled (2017)
“I could have chosen so many of Sofia Coppola’s films—her gift for the not-quite-love story is so profound,” says Fennell. “In The Beguiled, poor Colin Farrell is a Civil War soldier who finds himself injured at a remote boarding school full of beautiful blondes. Things do not go well for him.” That is, er, something of an understatement: In this claustrophobic, hothouse chamber piece, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, dressed in ghostly white, morph from fearful to ferocious, until blood pours and the battle beyond the gates feels far less frightening by comparison.
