Emerald Fennell
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Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
influenced "Wuthering Heights" (2026)
Themes
Did Wuthering Heights aim to be Fifty Shades of Brontë?
Compared to this, “Fifty Shades of Grey” looks like a chaste after school special.
Around that same time, another piece of Twilight-influenced media, Fifty Shades of Grey, dropped, and female-gaze smut made a resurgence in the mainstream.
It's shallow fan fiction that has more in common with E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey than Brontë's unflinching portrait of obsessive love, vengeance, the violence of class, racism and generational trauma.
There are certain aspects of Wuthering Heights, that seem very reminiscent of Fifty Shades of Grey in the way that desire, power, and kink intersect.
Fennell seems to be prodding us with the imagery of erotic submission that was once the purview of Harlequin romances but has now gone mainstream in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey and the dawn of BookTok.
Drawing from films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Teorema, Saltburn wears its inspirations on its sleeve while taking it up a notch.
With more than a nod towards Pasolini’s Theorem , a tinge of eroticism and unachievable desire underscore a subversive Saltburn .
“Saltburn” seems inspired by “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” with a touch of “Absolutely Fabulous.
Fennell is also keen to make sure Evelyn Waugh gets a name drop, just to make sure you get audience members will go home and be led to Googling Brideshead Revisited to see the similarity.
Whose character seems to stand in for Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited .
But those who are expecting a crossover between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited will be disappointed, as there is no satisfaction to be gained from watching evil geniuses do their magic, just like there are no hidden motivations to uncover that would justify their actions and make us understand them.
Comparisons will certainly be made to Brideshead Revisited , The Talented Mr. Ripley , and even the works of Donna Tartt.
As a result, Saltburn feels like Game of Thrones meets Brideshead Revisited as the chess game that starts at Oxford and continues at Saltburn reaches its delightfully dark and wicked climax.
If you watch the trailer for Promising Young Woman , the feature directorial debut of The Crown actress and Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, you’ll probably think you’re about to see a glossy proto-feminist tale of revenge, something akin to a 21st-century Ms .45 or a post-Weinstein Veronica Mars .
I’m thinking, specifically, of Abel Ferrara’s righteously furious Ms .45…
Any vicarious thrill from seeing these films’ antagonists hunted down by avenging angels (typically, but not always, the victims of rape) in work as varied in style and quality as The Last House on the Left (1972), Ms .45…
Drawing from films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Teorema, Saltburn wears its inspirations on its sleeve while taking it up a notch.
But those who are expecting a crossover between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited will be disappointed, as there is no satisfaction to be gained from watching evil geniuses do their magic, just like there are no hidden motivations to uncover that would justify their actions and make us understand them.
Saltburn is her mash-up of The Secret History and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a dark academia-soaked thriller stuffed with all the classic tropes of the niche aesthetic: extravagant architecture, dusty textbooks, and musky queer-coded young men.
Barry Keoghan is too old to be playing Oliver Quick, an Oxford scholarship student with a mysterious agenda, but I suppose they all are (classmates played by Jacob Elordi and Ewan Mitchell), and that may very well be intentional in what almost seems to be a stab at straightfaced parody of The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was already kinda funny to begin with), set in the malaise of a millennial-era rich teen drama—the boxy screen ratio sure makes it look like a TV show with an artistic eye.
Comparisons will certainly be made to Brideshead Revisited , The Talented Mr. Ripley , and even the works of Donna Tartt.
While watching this film, it was hard for me not to think of The Talented Mr. Ripley .
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
influenced Promising Young Woman (2020)
Characters
Fennell’s inspirations are more macabre, utilizing a snippet of The Night of the Hunter (1955) as a prelude to Cassandra’s eventual climax.
Back at work the next day, Cassie – who lives with her clueless parents (Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown, whose home décor is stuck in the ‘70s as they ironically watch The Night of the Hunter on TV) – serves a customer Ryan (Bo Burnham).
They definitely have no idea what Cassie gets up to in the evenings, their obliviousness underscored by a glibly amusing shot of them watching “The Night of the Hunter.”
In Charles Laughton’s, The Night of the Hunter, the film’s misogynistic serial killer protagonist, Rev. Harry Powell, says, “Not that you mind the killings.
Her take on Wuthering Heights feels akin to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) or The Great Gatsby (2013), in the sense that it's a literary adaptation that’s more concerned with theatricality and spectacle than translating a work of classic literature to the big screen as authentically as possible.
…like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
Fennell programmed a series at the BFI IMAX of titles that inspired her version of Wuthering Heights, including Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest and Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard.
It's no more salacious than an average episode of Bridgerton.
…more akin to a Bridgerton fumble under the petticoats…
Bells and whistles are not necessary, but you get them anyway, for a Bridgerton-style effect.
…it’s Wuthering Heights for the Bridgerton generation…
Not since British master Nicolas Roeg’s Gothic horror film Don’t Look Now has a filmmaker used mirrors so effectively to convey reflections and refractions of a character’s inner world, the looming threat of evil, and the truth.
…and Robert Egger’s Nosferatu…
During the promotional tour for "Nosferatu" in 2024, director Robert Eggers told The Verge that he viewed the story of "Nosferatu" as a "demon lover story," and frequently returned to one of the great demon lover stories while writing his script — Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights."
There was a similar dynamic in the form of David Slade’s “Hard Candy” (2005), featuring a so-young Elliot Page, in which sins are practiced upon the sinner with cold rebuke, but Fennell’s less interested in the protracted application of the laser than in keen appreciation of the delicate art of the bazooka.
It's not a particularly novel idea (beyond switching the gender of the vigilante, although that has been done before -- notably 2005's "Hard Candy") and it makes one wonder why she never went after the guilty before now rather than racking up an impressive list of strangers' names that she keeps in her "I humiliated" notebook compilation.
A movie thriller for the #MeToo movement writ large, “Promising Young Woman” is like a bit of stale “Hard Candy,” the 2005 film also premised around vengeance against a sexual predator that features a standout leading performance.
With The Crush (1993), Election (1999), and all the Poison Ivy sequels and knockoffs like Hard Candy (2005) and Pretty Persuasion (2005), media transformed abuse victims into cunning perpetrators of violence in their own right.
As dark revenge fantasies go, this is no “Hard Candy” or “Thoroughbreds.”
In 1988, The Accused came along, bringing the legal struggles of survivors to the forefront of the narrative, making the rape-revenge films that came before it culturally obsolete.
The cheaply constructed catharsis born from masculine perspectives and their attempts to navigate a woman’s emotional experiences in response to rape and sexual assault ranges from well intentioned exploitation such as I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) or any number of high-profile dramatic representations in morbid, if effective melodramas ( The Accused ; Death and the Maiden , Elle , etc.).
Overall, the film feels like “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) set in the “Promising Young Woman” (2020) universe.
…a baffling, IMAX-sized mix of “Promising Young Woman” and “The Untouchables,”…
Fennell’s film revels in a winking, sleazy glamour that for me recalled those thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s that capitalized on the sexual and professional anxieties of their time, like Disclosure , or Fatal Attraction .
Emerald Fennell's razor-sharp feature writing and directing debut could do for sexual assault what Fatal Attraction did with cheating: scare men into thinking twice.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced Promising Young Woman (2020)
Themes
There’s plenty of Hollywood precedent for movies about vengeful women, from Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill franchise, but those stories have traditionally been told by men.
In Fennell’s frustratingly small vision, the story of Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is reduced to simply a tragic love story, Titanic for Gen Z.
In the press, the writer-director has name-dropped James Cameron’s Titanic as a formative influence, and it’s definitely a touchstone in this Wuthering Heights’ more maudlin moments.
Loading Like Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman , Fresh is a feminist satire about the callous exploitation of women’s bodies, but writer Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave pitch their theme at such a visceral level that satire veers uncomfortably into torture porn.
The movie to which Fresh is likely to draw comparisons is Promising Young Woman , writer/director Emerald Fennell’s audacious, wildly divisive feminist satire, from a couple of years ago, starring Carey Mulligan as a revenge-minded survivor.
The film’s commentary about modern dating and toxic masculinity makes it a sort of cousin to 2020’s Promising Young Woman , although it pushes even more buttons than that film did, which is saying something.
The media coverage of 16-year-old Amy Fisher’s supposed “affair” with a man 40 years her senior (and the resulting shooting of his wife) and the release of Katt Shea’s Poison Ivy in 1992 gave rise to images of vulnerable young women as master manipulators, taking advantage of grown men who might otherwise have been seen as predators.
Think of Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) from “Death Wish” (1974), except Cassie purposely makes herself an easy target in Ohio watering holes, not a New York City subway car.
The Last House on the Left (1972)
Directed by Wes Craven
influenced Promising Young Woman (2020)
Plot
Any vicarious thrill from seeing these films’ antagonists hunted down by avenging angels (typically, but not always, the victims of rape) in work as varied in style and quality as The Last House on the Left (1972), Ms .45…