Rebecca (2020)

Ben Wheatley's Rebecca arrives as the latest pass at Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, trailing behind a certain Hitchcock picture that has loomed over the material for eighty years. The 2020 version, written by Jane Goldman and company and released by Netflix, is handsome in the way that expensive English estates are handsome. Cranborne Manor, Hatfield House, and four other stately properties do the heavy lifting. Lily James plays the unnamed bride with a tremor of permanent apology. Armie Hammer plays Maxim de Winter as a man who has recently been to the gym. Kristin Scott Thomas, as Mrs. Danvers, moves through the corridors like a cold front.

The narrative concerns a young woman installed in a great house where the staff prefer the previous wife, a dead woman of superior beauty and appetite. This is gothic machinery, and it turns on marriage, jealousy, and the quiet cruelty of households. The film lets these themes sit as melodrama. It makes no argument beyond the plot's own momentum. The servants and the gentry occupy their stations because the period requires it. Nobody remarks on it. The cast is uniformly white, the romance is heterosexual and unhappy, and the environment exists as weather and wallpaper. No sermon is delivered. No modern grievance is grafted onto the Cornish cliffs.

What we are left with is a lavish, slightly inert retread that critics received with a shrug. It is not a film with a message. It is a film with a mansion, a dead woman, and a housekeeper who has clearly been waiting her whole career for this. For the purposes of classification, the cultural yield is thin. The temperature is low. The sommelier sets down the glass and reaches for the next bottle.