+2
Rebecca (2020, Ben Wheatley)
There goes Wheatley again, trying to test every last bit of goodwill he has build up with me thanks to Kill List (2011) as he has been doing with nearly every new movie he has released since.
I have never read Du Maurier's original novel*, to my great shame, but Hitchcock's 1940 Best Picture-winning adaptation is my favorite movie directed by the Master of Suspense. So you could say this remake/re-adaptation already had to fight an uphill battle.
The movie is a debacle of terrible casting decisions, where a too young and soft-looking Armie Hammer is never able to sell the darkness brooding within Maxim De Winter and for some unknown reason Wheatly deemed Sam Riley of all people worthy enough to follow in the footsteps of the great George Sanders. The only person who doesn't seem out of place here is Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers, but even she has to struggle through some unfavourably written pieces of dialogue.
Wheatley was never a very stylish filmmaker, and he is at his best when maintaining a very loose, almost point-and-shoot style of filmmaking, which compliments his talent for creating anxiety-inducing scenarios. But for his latest movies, he has been favoring a more conventional stylistic approach, and I can't help but find it inept, artificial looking even. With Rebecca, he is aiming for something resembling a traditional gothic romance feel, but it looks more like an over-saturated perfume commercial, making an adaptation of an iconic piece of modern literature look more like that of some junk-y airport novel that would normally star someone like current-day Julia Stiles and a guy you've once seen on a network television show.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on this movie, maybe I would've been able to forgive it its blandness if I wasn't reminded with every scene that this material could be handled with more class, more ambiguity and more atmosphere and, oh yeah, it actually already has, 80 years ago.
* I wrote this review back in late October 2020, but at the moment of typing this I'm halfway through the novel and if anything, reading the original source text only makes me like this adaptation less.
Obviously, this means that this review was also written before the current scandal surrounding Armie Hammer had become public, though that wouldn't have changed my opinion on this movie in any way.