Film Review: "Rebecca" (2020).

From the director of High-Rise and Happy New Year, Colin Burstead comes Rebecca. This British romantic thriller film directed by Ben Wheatley, adapted by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse, and based on the 1938 novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. After a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo with handsome widower Maxim de Winter, a newly married young woman arrives at Manderley, her new husband's imposing family estate on a windswept English coast. Naive and inexperienced, she begins to settle into the trappings of her new life, but finds herself battling the shadow of Maxim's first wife, the elegant and urbane Rebecca, whose haunting legacy is kept alive by Manderley's sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers.

Published in 1938, English author Dam Daphne du Maurier's Gothic novel concerns an unnamed young woman who impetuously marries a wealthy widower, only to discover that he and his household are haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the title character. A best-seller which has never gone out of print, the novel sold 2.8 million copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965. It has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen, including a 1939 play by du Maurier herself, the film Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

In November 2018, it was announced a Netflix adaptation of du Maurier's 1938 literary classic with Wheatley as director, and with Lily James and Armie Hammer to star. By early June, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ann Dowd, Sam Riley, Bill Paterson, and Ben Crompton rounded out the cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and filming took place in Dorset and Devon, England.

The film stars James, Hammer, Scott Thomas, Dowd, Riley, Paterson, and Crompton. The cast, especially James, Hammer and Thomas, represent the characters with uncommon intensity.

The film is so faithful in spirit and detail that the same eerie spell emanates from the screen as from the book. Wheatley's direction is a masterpiece, one of the best that the Netflix screen has seen, and Laura Rose's photography is likewise raveworthy. A meeting of two cinematic titans who made a film that managed to feel like a product of both and neither of them at the same time. The film is a ghost story without a ghost, a murder mystery without an explicit act of murder. In its essence, the film is another entry in the Wuthering Heights school of dour, somber, psychological drama, steeped in ultra-British atmosphere. Though overlong...it is beautifully done. There are so many rich interpersonal relationships. This is not a romance or a history, but a bout of delicious Gothic psychoanalysis. Wheatley's first Netflix film is a sumptuous and suspenseful adaptation of du Maurier's romantic novel. It's an elegant production, beautifully photographed and designed like a dream house shrouded in mourning, but it also favors the pictorial over the cinematic and surface over subtext. The Hitchcock adaptation, however, ultimately prevents the film from living up to its reputation as one of Wheatley's best.

Simon says Rebecca receives:

Also, see my review for Happy New Year, Colin Burstead.