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Rebecca is the latest starry movie from Netflix, streaming now and starring Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristen Scott Thomas. This film is the latest adaptation of the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier, which tells the story of a young bride (played in the movie by Lily James) who finds herself struggling to fill the shoes of her new husband's dead wife Rebecca while living in a ghostly stately home called Manderley.
This story is an absolute classic of Gothic literature, once called the 14th best-loved novel ever written by the BBC. This has led to the story being adapted multiple times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in the Oscar-winning 1940 version.
Each of these versions takes its own liberties with the text, and the new Rebecca is no exception. In interviews leading up to the movie's release, for example, director Ben Wheatley discussed changing James' character.
Speaking on the Kermode & Mayo's Film Review podcast, for example, the High Rise director said: "The main change is that Lily James is not as young as the character in is in the book...She can play naive, but I didn't feel like I wanted to watch another film about an old man and a young woman...I felt that the actual power dynamic between them could still happen without having to play that age card."
In the book, the unnamed narrator played by James is in her early 20s while Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) is 42. In real life, meanwhile, James is 31 while Hammer is 34—a year older than Laurence Olivier was when he played that character in Hitchcock's version against a 23-year old Joan Fontaine.
In Wheatley's own view, he also played Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) as more sympathetic than other adaptations, that have featured her as just a malevolent force in the new wife's life with no definition features other than being evil and being obsessed with Rebecca.
Speaking to Sight & Sound Magazine, the director said: "I'm very sympathetic to Danvers. When you step back from the story, she's the one who knows what's happened [to Rebecca]....I wanted to make sure that she was supported within the film, so it doesn't have a black hat vs. white hat morality to it."
WARNING: The remainder of this article features spoilers both for the ending of the novel and the movie Rebecca
Wheatley is so sympathetic to Danvers, in fact, that he gives her an ending totally missing from the original novel. The book ends with Max and his wife discovering that Manderley is in flames, with the implication being that Danvers has set the house aflame in revenge for what she sees as Max getting away with the murder of Rebecca.
However, Wheatley makes this subtext text, with James' character meeting Danvers on a clifftop after she has set fire to Manderley. Whereas we do not know what happened to Danvers after this event in the book, in the film we see her jump into the water, in order to be reunited with Rebecca beyond the grave.
Max and his wife, meanwhile, get a genuine happy ending. Whereas in the book the new wife is haunted by Rebecca to the last, Wheatley has the character take a more active role in the third act compared to in the book where the character is fairly passive throughout. This means that by the end, the power imbalance between Max and his wife has righted itself and the pair are on equal footing.
In a final shot, we see them in Morocco together in what seems to be a romantic scene, suggesting that the pair have been able to move on from Rebecca for good together and are finally able to live their lives together out of her shadow.
Rebecca is streaming now on Netflix.
