Trailer preview: 'Jane Eyre'

It’s been shot silently and with sound, it’s been serialised, sequelised and prequelised, now Charlotte Bronte’s sweeping Yorkshire romance ‘Jane Eyre’ is back on our screens courtesy of ‘Sin Nombre’ director Cary Fukunaga. Tom Huddleston takes a look at the first trailer.

There’s a telling moment a little way into this trailer for Cary Fukunaga’s forthcoming adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel. We’ve already been treated to 30-odd seconds of rainswept burials, raging fires, little girls running along creepy corridors, black smoke pouring spectrally from fireplaces and a discussion on the nature of hell. But when the theme from Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ kicks in, it suddenly becomes clear where this latest screen version is heading.

The two stories aren’t entirely dissimilar, at least aesthetically: both concern remote girls’ schools, unnerving elderly women, heavy weather and lashings of grim death. And while this doesn’t mean we’re likely to see Blanche Ingram fall into a pit of barbed wire or Mrs Fairfax turn out to be one of the Three Mothers, it does hopefully imply that Fukunaga has looked a little further afield for his influences than the usual staid BBC period fare.

The rest of the trailer – following Michael Fassbender’s Wellesian introduction on horseback – seeks to deepen the mystery, with notable nods to the likes of ‘The Others’ and ‘The Exorcist’ along with the expected ‘Gosford Park’ stately home trappings. It might all be terribly overwrought and silly, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing (as anyone who’s seen ‘Suspiria’ can attest), and there’s certainly enough in this trailer to whet our cinematic appetites while we wait for Andrea Arnold’s feverishly anticipated take on ‘Wuthering Heights’. Stay off the moors!



---