The year after Selznick International Pictures released Victor Fleming’s “Gone with the Wind” (1939), David O. Selznick took home his second Oscar in as many years when he produced Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood masterpiece, “Rebecca” (1940). It was Hitchcock’s only release to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it was his first nomination for Best Director (though he never won). The master of suspense would go on to direct “Vertigo” (1958), which the British Film Institute’s “Sight & Sound” critics’ voted the greatest film of all time in a 2012 poll.
Without hyperbole, “Rebecca” is one of the most important releases in cinematic history. Perhaps the most twisted mystery about the 2020 Netflix remake is how a filmmaking team could impoverish such a rich source of inspiration.
Ben Wheatley’s production (2020) had its world premiere Wednesday, Oct. 21. It is an adaptation of the 1938 novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.
Set in what the audience can only assume is pre-war Europe, a young woman (Lily James) works at the French Riviera as a paid companion to a wealthy American named Mrs. Van Hopper (Ann Dowd) At Monte Carlo, she meets the aristocratic English widower Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer). By the end of their holiday, Maxim marries “the second Mrs. de Winter” before taking her back to his estate, Manderley. There, his housekeeper—Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas)—obsesses over his first wife, the late Rebecca de Winter. Even in death, the specter of Rebecca casts a shadow across Mrs. de Winter’s new life. That is until she finds herself increasingly afraid of the enigmatic Maxim and persecuted by the dreadful Mrs. Danvers.
If Gus Van Sant’s remake of “Psycho” (1998) teaches us anything, it is that it’s futile to remake Hitchcock unless done shot for shot. This begs the question: why attempt to remake the master of suspense at all?
But even if one were to interpret Wheatley’s “Rebecca” as a reimagining of the original du Maurier novel, rather than a remake of the Hitchcock film, Wheatley’s “Rebecca” still fatally misunderstands its source material. “Rebecca” is meant to be a ghost story without a ghost, a Gothic romance suspending audience members over the edge of their seat with the psychological thrills of social humiliation. Manderley is not supposed to be a haunted house of cheap jump scares, lying in wait to startle you like underpaid teenagers at a Halloween corn maze.
Aesthetically speaking, Laurie Rose’s cinematography in “Rebecca” is beyond reproach, and the art design is unimpeachable. A glassy-eyed Hammer delivers the same movie-star good looks and packs as theatrical and dramatic of a punch as the classically trained Sir Laurence Olivier. However, this is not enough for Wheatley to intoxicate you the same way Hitchcock did. For fans of the book and the film alike, “Rebecca” is as unfulfilling as the second Mrs. de Winter is for Mrs. Danvers.
