Brace yourself for a December heat wave! That’s when the new film adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, based on D.H. Lawrence’s novel of the same name, finally hits Netflix — and judging by the trailer above, things are about to get as steamy as the inside of Rose and Jack’s car in Titanic.  

Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (The Mustang), the film stars The Crown’s Emma Corrin as Lady Constance Chatterley, whose happy marriage to Sir Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) soon turns sour when he returns wounded and scarred from World War I. No longer able to walk, Clifford treats his wife as a nursemaid, leaving her more lonely than she thought possible. For a while, Constance’s only companion is housekeeper Mrs. Bolton (Joely Richardson, who in fact played Constance in Ken Russell’s 1993 TV series adaptation). But things change when she meets Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell), the new gamekeeper for the couple’s English estate. “I don’t think I realized how lonely I’d been,” Constance tells Oliver in the trailer. “Until now.” What begins as a tentative flirtation soon explodes into a mess of passion and sexual discovery that threatens to unravel Constance’s entire existence. 

Between their performance as Princess Diana in The Crown and a recent turn opposite Harry Styles in My Policeman, Corrin knows a thing or two about complicated marriages. Clermont-Tonnerre’s vision, with its emphasis on Constance’s needs and emotions, immediately resonated with the actor. “I think it says so much about what it is to be a woman needing sexual pleasure and intimacy and the legitimacy of that need and that want,” Corrin tells Netflix. “It’s not something that you should be ashamed about. It’s not something that you should deprive yourself of. It’s something that we all need.”

Desire is everywhere in Lawrence’s novel, which was famously banned at the time of its wide 1959 publication in part because of its graphic sex scenes. But for Clermont-Tonnerre, the real key to a successful adaptation lay in telling the story from Constance’s point of view. Together with screenwriter David Magee (Life of Pi, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), the director combed through Lawrence’s work, teasing out new meanings for the screen.

“He was one of the very few male writers to address female sexual pleasure,” she says. “That’s why it was so scandalous. But it was in the sense of really glorifying the revitalization of human beings through connections, sensuality, nature. And it was very avant-garde. No one was really ready to accept it. And we are not fully ready yet to accept it today.” 

In line with her emphasis on sexual agency, Clermont-Tonnerre worked with intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, who previously worked on the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, to conceptualize and map out every single sex scene in the film. The director also looked to Austrian painter Egon Schiele, best known for his erotic and nude self-portraits, for aesthetic inspiration. 

Corrin admits they were initially nervous about the sheer amount of sex in the film — the snippets shown in the trailer of Constance and Oliver frantically undressing are just the tip of the iceberg. For Corrin, the most important step was finding the right person to play Mellors. “I’d been quite apprehensive about it, ’cos I knew the script and I knew how much intimacy there was,” they say. “Laure and I were both on the same page. We wanted Mellors to be so different, real and raw and sensitive.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover debuts in select theaters in November and premieres on Netflix in December. Check out the new teaser art for the film here: