Why does Emerald Fennell keep killing women off?

The director charges towards whatever cultural argument is burning hottest

As the credits rolled in the hushed dark of Dalston’s Rio Cinema in east London, an awestruck cluster of women exchanged open-mouthed, horrified looks. Tears welled. Eyebrows arched in bafflement. No one was ready to stand. There was one woman responsible: Emerald Fennell, Britain’s most divisive filmmaker. This was the latest instalment in her cinematic universe: a visually lush tableau, fevered performances from the most celebrated actors of the moment and another catastrophic end for its leading woman.

It had not begun like this. Acts one and two of Wuthering Heights were absurd – not cleverly so, just fantastically stupid. Charli XCX’s music thumped in at moments that felt like they had been chosen by dartboard; the costumes looked as if they had tumbled off the back of a Shein lorry; and Australia’s most aggressively symmetrical exports, Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw, wobbled in and out of English accents, sniffing each other’s arses like overbred Pomeranians in heat. It was mental meringue – titillating, inoffensive, a glossy and unserious confection.

And then the third act: the deluge. The zany Isabella Linton reappears collared, filthy, chained to a wall, barking her devotion at Heathcliff. It is framed as consensual degradation, daring you to laugh along. Catherine fares no better. So undone by love, she wills herself into fatal decline: a baby lost, an infection left to fester, red, feverish veins spidering across her skin as sepsis claims her by degrees. Suckling fat leeches slick her body; blood pours insistently between her thighs. She fades from woman to wraith, grey as ash, less a character than a gothic prop wheeled out for maximum aestheticised suffering. Frothy fun curdled abruptly into something rancid. Cathy hardens into a marbleised martyr of the Fennell multiverse, another female lead denied the complexity or vitality afforded to their male counterparts.

In an era when shock factor barely raises an eyebrow, Fennell has reinvented it, sparking debate every time her films flicker across the silver screen. Her method is surgical: disturb the audience with uncomfortable sex and tangle the lines of consent. In her heat-seeking-missile fashion, Fennell charges towards whatever cultural argument is burning hottest and hurls her budget at sculpting it according to her lacquered vision of beauty and debauchery. Saltburn flicked a towel at class politics without grappling with them; Promising Young Woman reduced the nuance of sexual assault to an underdeveloped revenge fantasy. Her films never deliver what they are marketed as embodying.

In 2023, she “normalised” menstruation by depicting Alison Oliver as Venetia Catton – her trusty vehicle for perversion – engaging in a bloody oral sex scene in Saltburn. Venetia is bulimic, unravelling and meets her untimely end with her wrists slit. Her mother, Elspeth – a wicked, insensitive narcissist – dies when the protagonist yanks her breathing tube from her terminally ill body.

Then there’s Promising Young Woman, Fennell’s 2020 MeToo tract, in which Cassie (Carey Mulligan) sets out to make men pay for the sexual assault of her friend Nina, who died by suicide in the aftermath. Cassie winds up dead, too. Perhaps it is the Fennellian destiny of all her female characters. Or perhaps there is a giant button on her keyboard labelled “KILL THE WOMAN”, on to which she pounds her fist.

None of this would matter were it not for the scale of Fennell’s claims. Saltburn, she insisted, was “extraordinarily feminist”. “Everything I do is feminist, because it’s what I live my life by,” she said. “Being a female filmmaker is a feminist action. And it’s become more and more apparent as I go on how much of a feminist act it is.” The accolades follow. In 2021, when Promising Young Woman won an Oscar, Grazia declared it a “win for all women”. Margot Robbie proclaims that Wuthering Heights is a “radical” depiction of female desire. What does it say about feminism when one of Hollywood’s most celebrated female directors can imagine no fate for her women beyond death, while her men end the film swinging their penises around?

This cinematic universe is not nearly as interesting as it fancies itself to be. Fennell’s filmmaking lives in an aesthetically pleasing, uncompromising void – a film calibrated for shallow audiences. Its extremes exist to yank you away from doomscrolling long enough to clutch your pearls at Elordi sniffing Robbie’s fingers. Then it spits you out, primed to compose snivelling posts on X proclaiming how utterly freaky the whole thing is. It is the cinematic equivalent of a TikToking mother in middle America, flaunting the appalling dinners she feeds her family, hoping your hate comments will juice the algorithm and finance her next $60,000 minivan. Or, in Fennell’s case, to greenlight her next transgressive, vapid production.

Women flock to Fennell’s films to ogle Hollywood’s latest It-boy and to bid a gory farewell to its It-girl. Fennell succeeds because she shocks, but to mistake this multiverse for anything other than high-gloss rage-bait engineered to jolt us out of our cultural stupor is naive. You will return again and again, persuaded this is girl-power cinema by virtue of authorship alone. But let’s not pretend Emerald Fennell is a great interpreter of the 21st century, or a pioneering feminist filmmaker. This is art designed to provoke, not illuminate; to inflame, not interrogate. In her world, there’s no way out alive.

[Further reading: Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is porn]