Rebecca Is a Bafflingly Disappointing New Adaptation of an Old Classic

There’s a reason we don’t have many adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s beloved Gothic novel Rebecca. Though the story of a young woman who marries a wealthy widower and finds more than she anticipated in his manor home is a rich text that seems like a clear match for the screen, for the past 80 years any potential adaptations have been haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s mostly revered 1940 film. The position of attempting not to mimic a film that many consider iconic while not creating something that simply exists in opposition isn’t an enviable one, but it does present an exciting challenge to filmmakers with the vision and skill to try their hand.

Unfortunately, director Ben Wheatley’s 2020 version of Rebecca, now streaming on Netflix, has very little of either.

Lily James and Armie Hammer as Mrs. and Mr. de Winter. Kerry Brown/Netflix

We begin in sun-splashed 1930s Monte Carlo, where a shy young woman (Lily James) is working as a paid companion to a wealthy older woman, Mrs. Van Hopper (Ann Dowd). She meets wealthy (and wounded) widower Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), and through a series of furtive day trips to lush Mediterranean locales, the two develop a whirlwind romance such that when Mrs. Van Hopper announces abruptly that she and her companion will be leaving for New York, Maxim proposes marriage instead.

Despite an idyllic honeymoon, shortly after the couple’s arrival at Manderley—Maxim’s enormous home in the Cornwall countryside—the new Mrs. de Winter’s illusions of bliss rapidly begin to break down. Not only is entering the world of the landed gentry uncomfortable and overwhelming, but everyone is constantly comparing her to Maxim’s first wife, the beautiful and cherished Rebecca. Particularly worrisome is the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is inexplicably chilly to the bride from their first meeting and seems determined to rattle and undermine her. Trouble accumulates, and Mrs. de Winter starts to suspect that neither Manderley or her marriage are quite what they seem.

Kristin Scott Thomas, left, as Mrs. Danvers. Kerry Brown/Netflix

If the movie’s biggest problem were that it simply couldn’t keep up with the source material or Hitchcock’s interpretation, it would be disappointing but understandable. Admittedly, I know the book quite well and am deeply attached to it, so I did my best to pull back and question whether, taken on its own, the movie had merits unconnected to its identity as an adaptation. Alas, the casting missteps, tepid directorial style, and bewildering script create something toothless for those unfamiliar with the book and borderline unwatchable for those intimately acquainted.

First, because it is least egregious, there is the casting of the leads. Considering how little resemblance the script bears to the novel, the miscasting feels almost irrelevant, yet the mistakes are representative of the film’s fundamental misunderstanding of the story. While Mrs. de Winter (whose first name is never revealed in either the source text or this movie) is described as “plain” and awkward, Lily James is undeniably luminous and charismatic, and while the book calls for cool depth from Maxim, the only thing Armie Hammer has in common with the character is that they’re both wealthy-looking. Certainly there are actors who have the ability to transform their presence and mannerisms to play against type, but if either James or Hammer has that ability—or the ability to transcend bad writing with compelling performances—they certainly don’t bring it to this movie.

Kerry Brown/Netflix

Given the constraints of working around Judith Anderson’s memorable 1940 performance and a script generally uninterested in what makes Mrs. Danvers a frightening character, Kristin Scott Thomas does make some intriguing choices. In smaller roles, Sam Riley as Jack Favell, Rebecca’s leering cousin, and Keeley Hawes as Maxim’s sister, Beatrice, bring well-tuned approaches to their characters. However, they’re all at the mercy of the script, which sprinkles du Maurier’s crisp and loaded dialogue like cheese over the soup of clumsy invented theatrics.

Ben Wheatley’s direction is the element perhaps most haunted by the 1940 film, which, though hampered by the morality codes of the time, shines stylistically. Wheatley makes a couple of attempts to enrich the storytelling with vague visual allusions, but the overall unremarkableness stands in stark contrast to many of his previous movies, such as High Rise and Free Fire, which are perhaps best known for bold choices, whether or not they ultimately work. Directorial flair probably couldn’t have saved the movie, either, but at least it would have been something interesting to look at.

Kerry Brown/Netflix

Far be it from me to suggest that writing an adapted screenplay is an easy task, but it’s hard to imagine why anyone would make it more difficult for themselves in the ways that Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse have. The perfectly calibrated, dread-inducing push and pull of the novel’s plot is warped and shuffled to follow a conventional schema of escalating drama, suggesting that the writers either didn’t recognize the inherent dramatic build of du Maurier’s writing or didn’t feel themselves capable of transferring that build to screen. They even create plot problems for themselves that they then have to bend over backwards to fix. It’s as if they settled the tightly plotted, deceptively complex evening gown that is the source material over a mannequin and then, thinking themselves the birds and mice from Cinderella, went about snipping, stripping, and embellishing until they’d not only thoroughly divorced themselves from the text but created something totally devoid of style or function.

Kerry Brown/Netflix

“Faithfulness” is a complicated quality to evaluate when it comes to screen adaptations of novels. It can mean strict adherence to the literal details of the book, but it can also mean genuine engagement with the book’s themes and structure, which is sometimes a more significant criterion. When you understand what makes a story and its characters tick, you can create something with the potential to compel both newcomers and longtime fans. While this movie falls woefully short of this measure, the book remains perfect reading for the type of chilly, gray skies weather of the season. Whether it’s your first read or you regularly dream you’ve gone to Manderley again, it’ll be a much more meaningful use of your time than this adaptation.