THREE of Daphne du Maurier’s most famous stories – Rebecca, The Birds and Jamaica Inn – were boldly adapted by Alfred Hitchcock many decades ago. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that this latest big-screen adaptation of her work has a distinctly Hitchcockian air to it.
Philip (Sam Claflin) is a young Englishman who was taken in when he was a seven-year-old orphan and raised by his eerily lookalike cousin Ambrose (also played by Claflin) in a grand manor on the Cornish coast. One day, while away on one of his many trips to sunny Italy, Ambrose reveals that his distant cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz) is in Florence with him and now his wife. After noticing changes in the tone of the letters Ambrose would regularly send back home – complaints of terrible headaches and suspicions that he might be being poisoned by Rachel – Philip goes out to visit and discovers that Ambrose has died.
He learns that Ambrose left him everything in his will which he will receive in full once he turns 25. When Rachel arrives at the Cornwall estate, Philip plans to look upon her with keenly suspicious eyes but finds himself blindsided by her beauty and becomes utterly besotted with her.
This atmospheric tale of suspicion versus obsession attempts to get under the skin of the Gothic locale, cobwebbed interiors and formalwear of the period drama with which we’re all too familiar. And it mostly succeeds, with writer-director Roger Michell drawing on the threatening tone of his underrated stalker film Enduring Love to give the drama an effective sense of simmering danger here, even if he keeps things at a slower burn rather than the fiery boil that the material’s dark heart needs.
It benefits from two great central performances. Claflin continues to prove himself a most compelling example of young British acting talent, playing the re-orphaned Philip as a wide-eyed puppy dog type following around his late guardian’s black widow, too guileless to really do anything about his doubts about her. “How easy it must be for a woman like your cousin Rachel to twist you around her little finger,” remarks long-time friend and better-suited companion Louise (Holliday Grainger).
Weisz is at the top of her game as the titular anti-heroine, conveying the kind of easy charm and likeability that puts Philip under her spell as it undoubtedly did Ambrose, all tinged with an undercurrent of menace. But crucially it’s never a caricaturish performance as Weisz imbues her with a sense of humanity as someone wanting to live her own life apart from the constrictions of what’s expected of a wife, a widow and a woman in a male-driven society.
The ever-influential tones of Hitchcock can be felt strongly throughout Michell’s adaptation, from the haunted gothicness of Rebecca to the heightened obsession of Vertigo, as well as shades of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Thomas Vinterberg’s recent adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd. They’re soaked-up influences in an intriguing and elegant film that breathes enough fresh life into the well-worn period romance genre.
THREE STARS
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