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Rebecca cannot be accused of not being a brave film. It is not every director who would try and do a new version of a story that has not only been tackled by one of our greatest ever directors, Alfred Hitchcock but was also the only one of that director's movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture.
The new Netflix version of the movie, directed by High Rise's Ben Wheatley and starring Lily James and Armie Hammer, however, manages to acquit itself slightly better than other Hitchcock remakes like the 1998 Rear Window TV movie or the strange shot-for-shot remake of Psycho released that same year.
In interviews, Wheatley has said that his new Netflix Rebecca is not a new version of the Hitchcock movie but another adaptation of the Daphne Du Maurier tale of murder and madness at Manderley.
This is not going to stop film fans, however, from comparing the casts of the two films. The 1940 version had Laurence Oliver as the grieving Max de Winter, Joan Fontaine as his new unnamed wife, who constantly feels like she is being negatively compared to Max's dead wife Rebecca, and Judith Anderson as the conniving Mrs. Danvers, the Manderley housekeeper likely romantically obsessed with her former employer. All three of those, incidentally, were Oscar-nominated for their roles.
In 2020, meanwhile, we have Armie Hammer and his surprisingly convincing English accent as Max, a Lily James as his wife and Kristin Scott Thomas as Danvers.
All are excellently cast, and do what they do best. Having Max played by an American works particularly well, as it adds another element to his many layers of repression and mystery: We know that Hammer is doing an accent, and wonder what else might be false about this character. (Spoiler alert—a lot).
James and Scott Thomas, meanwhile, both play roles they have perfected over their careers. James is one of modern cinema's great secretly steely ingenues, equally at home registering every moment of panic she feels as she tries and fails to live up to Rebecca and showing an inner resolves once the plot mechanics begin to reveal themselves at the start of the third act.
Scott Thomas, meanwhile, is dream casting for Danvers: It is easy to imagine her character as the same one she played in Four Weddings and a Funeral, turning harder and colder as she ages until she is a malevolent iceberg, moving slowly and surely to destroy the new Mrs. de Winter who she feels is trying to take Rebecca's place.
Ann Dowd is also worth singling out as a hilarious Mrs. Van Hopper, the brash social climber who James' character is working for at the start of the movie. The campaign to have her and Catherine O'Hara play sisters in something starts here.
Wheatley is also helped in his version of Rebecca by having two things available to him that Hitchcock was unable to use 80 years ago. The first is color, with cinematographer Laurie Rose getting great mileage in the slow change from the bright and romantic colors of Monte Carlo where the de Winters first meet to the dark shadows of Manderley and its grey violent-looking jagged beach. In this film, Manderley manages not only to be one of fiction's great houses but a sort of gilded prison, jam-packed with objects haunted with the ghost of their former owner.
Another thing Wheatley gets to use is sex. While the Hays Code meant that Hitchcock characters had to express their sexual desires in other ways (see Jimmy Stewart's binoculars in Rear Window or obsession with Kim Novak's hair bun in Vertigo), this new version can just have Max and the new Mrs. de Winter have sex.
Though Rebecca is hardly one of Netflix's bonkbusters like 365 Days or Dark Desire (and has nothing on Wheatley's Sightseers and its knitted panties), the love scenes help solve one of the problems of the Hitchcock version which, as it never shows any passion between Olivier and Fontaine, makes us wonder exactly why this pair have got married when Max really seems to just treat her with constant contempt.
Other new elements to the story, however, work less well. The Netflix version contains a number of dream sequences that call back to the director's psychedelic horror movies like A Field in England, but not all of these are successful—when James is so good at expressing every emotion on her face, we do not to see her emotions spelled out with clunky dream metaphors.
The movie also answers a few questions that the original novel left unanswered. Though some might welcome finding out exactly where Danvers goes at the end and what happens next with the de Winters, other may prefer the ambiguity that Du Maurier left us with.
While the new Mrs. de Winter might spend most of the movie haunted by Rebecca, the movie manages to escape the ghost of Hitchcock—but that is not always a wholly positive thing, with some elements just feeling different for the sake of it, or just because the movie may as well use all of its Netflix budget.
Rebecca is released on Netflix on October 21.
