Something goes missing in this glossy take on Daphne du Maurier’s psychological puzzlebox Rebecca – and it’s not Rebecca.
Ben Wheatley, that auteur of all things British, savagely comic, dog-offing and usually carved from the most meagre of budgets, goes upscale but leaves his signature touch behind in a treatment that doesn’t begin to invite comparisons with the 1940 Hitchcock Best Picture winner.
It’s gluten-free Wheatley: bland and generic. Even the pooch gets away unscathed.
Lily James and Armie Hammer are earnest. Clad in suits significantly more charismatic than him, Hammer’s Maxim is a stiff and uninvolving presence when he should be rakish and mysterious. James isn’t a whole lot more compelling. The pair strain for chemistry and psychological depth and don’t find either.
As du Maurier’s source material demands, James’s character remains unnamed. She’s introduced in Monte Carlo as an assistant to a gauche American tourist (Ann Dowd, almost as terrifying as in Hereditary), but is soon stolen away by newly widowed Maxim. She’s whisked to his Cornish coastal pile, Manderlay, for married life, walks by the seaside and assorted torments from psycho housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas.
Shot by long-time Wheatley cinematographer Laurie Rose, it’s all very handsome, with lots of shots of posh County Life interiors. It has one advantage over the Alfred Hitchcock version in that it was shot in England rather than on a Hollywood sound stage, but that mostly translates into cutaways to crashing waves and Downton Abbey-ish shots of vintage cars vrooming around the countryside. Hitchcock was meticulous in decoupling Manderlay from its surrounds, but that sense of isolation, so critical in confining Mrs de Winter in her gilded prison, is missing here.
The Ben Wheatley we know and love from off-kilter gems like Sightseers does reappear briefly for a Manderlay ball scene but the rest is mostly a damp squib.
DIRECTOR
Ben Wheatley
RELEASE DATE
On Netflix now
