The casting was wrong. Female servants revel in the narrator's stumbles up society's ladder. What a little fool I am, being hopeful about anything. Maxim is meant to be mysterious, but throughout the film Hammer makes him opaque. and Wheatley's new adaptation further complicates the viewer's moral acrobatics. “Rebecca was a book first!” Sure, some detractors knew that, but no one really seemed to care. Too often these adaptations leave you asking the question, “Why would Maxim ever look twice at her?” but this one makes it abundantly clear that there is more to this solitary naif than meets the eye, and that is why Maxim loves her. With so much going for it, how could the new adaptation of Rebecca have turned out to be so bland? Hitchcock's adaptation of Rebecca famously altered the ending in compliance with the moral guidelines of Hollywood's Hays code, making any attempt to identify the story's villain even more precarious. (Hard to argue with that, as we’ll come to see.) The setting is the late-1930s but he looks like a refugee from The Great Gatsby a decade earlier. More unsettling than truly scary, Rebecca's horrors are cerebral instead of visceral, making it a perfect addition to any roundup of scary-but-not-too-scary Halloween movies. Her performance itself is appropriately chilling, but it is also missing the queer subtext that makes Mrs. Danvers the most iconic character in any version of Rebecca. Its genre is slippery: Romance? Honestly, the same could be said of the Hitchcock movie, though Wheatley’s crimes against the novel are certainly more egregious. But the scariest thing in the film is a cruel reality check from Mrs. Danvers: "He'll leave you, he'll divorce you. Mrs. Danvers, whose machinations in the novel target the narrator directly, does one better in the film, instead tricking other women into doing her dirty work. Schadenfreude personified -- monsterified. The scarcity of resources is a financial one, but the cards are dealt based on gender. Maxim comes gallantly to her rescue (with a whiff of Hammer's signature Winklevii) by inviting her to share his table. You can’t blame the heroine for falling for the excitement he offers, though. Eventually, she reveals a possessiveness tinged with madness. I love seeing new interpretations of stories I love, whether it’s a nine-hour expansion of The Turn of the Screw with The Haunting of Bly Manor (which lovingly names its protagonist after the director of The Innocents, another beloved and virtually untouchable classic), Shakespeare-turned-teen-comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You or something as straight as Wheatley’s Rebecca. James, with a blonde bob and a tentative manner, effectively makes her love-struck as they drive along the sparkling coast, and innocent enough to ignore warning signs about Maxim’s past. Scott Thomas is the most successful at charting a trajectory for her character. Even her name isn't her own: While many brides struggle to get used to the Mrs. moniker, the second Mrs. de Winter must subsume the same name as her husband's lost love. Entertain your brain with the coolest news from streaming to superheroes, memes to video games. He is boring but he is also tall, and against the latter I am sadly powerless. Or perhaps Lily James' unnamed narrator and protagonist, known only as "the second Mrs. de Winter," isn't as virtuous as she seems. That said, he does a good job here, imbuing Maxim de Winter with a warmth that makes his refusal to speak about his deceased first wife and his growing coolness towards his second that much more effective as the story progresses. This new Rebecca feels as if someone at Downton Abbey were having a bad day. His impossibly glamourous first wife, Rebecca, had died in an unexplained shipwreck. The film sleepwalks through other scenes meant to be tense, though. The film's spooky elements, ramped up from both the novel and the Hitchcock adaptation, become a Trojan horse for the chilling reality of heterosexual marriage in the hyper-stratified world of early 20th century England. It's a zero-sum game. The love affair begins with a hint of this paternalism when the adorably unsophisticated narrator is turned away from a fancy restaurant terrace on the sun-dappled shores of southern France. Wheatley has never deserved the excellent casts he assembles in his films, and he’s never been able to stick the landing on any of the promising concepts he’s been fortunate enough to direct. Armie Hammer and Lily James in the 2020 Netflix adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, directed by Ben Wheatley. Leaving “little fool” in suggests how conflicted the film is between being faithful to its source and daring to move beyond it. It begins with the narrator’s voiceover of the book’s famous first line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” a dream in which the house is in ruins. Read about our approach to external linking. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Maxim seduces the narrator -- and the audience -- with some very sexy, very sandy premarital beach romps, but the film soon darkens as James' narrator marries and then follows her increasingly smarmy new husband to his sprawling English estate. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film has become a classic, of course: a psychological thriller that brilliantly translated the novel’s Gothic atmosphere to the screen, demonstrating how well Du Maurier’s story could morph over time. It fails because it is actually a perfect adaptation of Rebecca — the novel by Daphne du Maurier, not the 1940 film by Alfred Hitchcock — until it suddenly isn’t. Lily James’s earnestness serves her well as the second Mrs. de Winter, and beneath her worldly inexperience and debilitating imposter syndrome is a distinct personality. Netflix has resurrected the haunted house of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca from the ashes just in time for Halloween. At almost every turn, women stymie each other. Joan Fontaine’s subservience as the heroine, an extreme version of what society accepted at the time, plays more strongly now as a sign of her self-doubt. It fails because it is actually a perfect adaptation of Rebecca — the novel by Daphne du Maurier, not the 1940 film by Alfred Hitchcock — until it suddenly isn’t. Even identifying a villain is a deceptively elusive endeavor. Rebecca -- whether the 1938 novel, the Oscar-winning 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation or this new 2020 version directed by Ben Wheatley-- is a bit of a Rorschach test. But she soon discovers the house is haunted: by unresolved grief, or something darker. But Wheatley's adaptation crowns a villain worthy of the antihero era in its final frame. The costumes and its sexy new vibe, also wrong. And he was, but not for the expected reasons. But as soon as the film shifts into more of a plot-based thriller, it loses sight of what made it so interesting in the first place. When the second Mrs de Winter learns the facts of Rebecca’s life and death, we see that she has lost her innocence. Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. Casting Maxim as a younger man is also an unexpected stroke of genius from Wheatley. Indeed, the last third of the movie is so rote and uninspiring that it unfortunately renders the entire thing a waste of time. Du Maurier channelled that anxiety into her 1938 bestseller about a mousy young woman, a never-named narrator who marries Maxim de Winter. Lily James is charming as the heroine, and Kristin Scott Thomas is a gleefully wicked Mrs Danvers, but that is hardly enough. The second Mrs de Winter becomes the ill-prepared mistress of Maxim’s great estate of Manderley, where her timidity is no match for the villainous housekeeper Mrs Danvers or the lingering spectre of Rebecca. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. Director Ben Wheatley, known for dark, stylish and sometimes violent films including High-Rise (2015), always seemed like an odd choice to direct. Almost as if they actively decided not to go the classic Danny route, Goldman and Wheatley instead portray her as more of a spiteful schemer than a woman driven mad by grief, which robs significant meaning from her destructive choices as the film speeds towards its inevitable conclusion. As Du Maurier made clear, it is not truth the heroine cares about, but the knowledge that Maxim loves her, a dark ending that this pallid adaptation doesn’t begin to earn. The film even lends itself to a feminist reading, with the heroine a woman who learns to come into her own. And that, in the end, is the problem with Rebecca. When he asks her to come to Manderley with him, she wonders, “As your secretary?” and he recites one of the novel’s notable lines: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.” The screenplay has wiped out most of the other period touches that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in the 30s.
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