Audience reaction inside the theater was largely mixed, with some visible restlessness, while others were won over. The film, described by one attendee as aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive, leans hard into Fennell’s now-familiar brand of stylized depravity. It’s a deliberately unromantic take on Brontë’s novel, stripped of emotional nuance and full of salacious detours that serve shock value.
There’s hyper-sexualized imagery — far more explicit than any previous adaptation of this material. The film opens with a public hanging that quickly descends into grotesque absurdity, as the condemned man ejaculates mid-execution, sending the onlooking crowd into a kind of orgiastic frenzy. A nun even fondles the corpse’s visible erection.
Later, a woman is strapped into a horse’s reins for a BDSM-tinged encounter. There are several masturbation scenes shot in that now-signature Fennell style—intimate, clinical, and purposefully discomforting. The camera lingers on suggestive textures: egg yolks running through fingers, dough being kneaded with quiet aggression, a slug sliding slowly down glass.
[...] The adaptation reportedly diverges significantly from the source material, playing out much as one might expect from Fennell reinterpreting a literary classic via her increasingly polarizing lens.
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