You can’t fault Ben ✃Wheatley’s nerve. It takes the bravest of directors to re-adapt gothic romance Rebecca after Hitchcock’s 1940 Oscar-winning black-and-white chiller set the bar so high.
But by diving into Daphne Du Maurier’s original book, Whea▨tley has unearthed a lush, surprisingly glossy romance. In luxurious, pre-World War Two Monte Carlo, a class-crossed love affair ignites between Lily James’ shy, poor, lady’s companion (the character is famously never named) and Armie Hammer’s Maxim de Winter🍌, a sad and wealthy English widower.
Cool your jets, though, if you’re expecting hair-raising eruptions of Wheatley’s trademark indie horror (澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:A Field In England) or satirical ultra violence (澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:High-Rise). Always a genre rover, who loves t𝔍o mix it up, here he happily rolls a thriller, psychological horror, and courtroom drama in♏to a traditional ’50s-style Hollywood women’s picture.
Revelling in the contrast between the sunny, beach-and-open-top-Bentley idyllic courtship, and the dour, oppressive Manderley (a kind of dismal, antique-crammed Downton Abbey) that the newlyweds return to, the film sticks firmly to the adoring b🎃ut increasingly terrified point of view of the second Mrs De Winter.
She’s tortured and tricked🌌 with icy elegance by grieving housekeeper Mrs Danvers (a superb, snubbing Kristin Scott Thomas), with the ever-present memory of Maxim’s dead wife Rebecca, until her dreams crackle with creepy fantasies.
This rich, riveting relationship heavily overshadows the film’s firmly Cert 12 love affair (Hammer&🍌rsquo;s damaged, movie-star handsome Maxim lacks both the requisite well-mannered menace and a clipped English aristocrat’s accent).
With real audacity, the film engenders an unlikely pity for its villain, but even James’ brave Cinderella-honed sweetness can’t make Wheatley’s empowering but incongruous final-act plot changes land. Appropriately for a story about an inescapable predecessor, Hitchcock’s cruel, taut movie haunts this adaptation, the way that Rebec🔯ca herself haunts Manderley.
