"Rebecca for Dummies": Netflix's remake is a pointless exercise in nothing—so why watch it?

In his 1993 film Dear Diary, the Italian director Nanni Moretti stages a gleeful fantasy sequence in which, after a miserable experience at the cinema, he tracks down a film reviewer and reads his rave review of Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer back to him, tormenting the hapless critic with the sound of his own idiotic prose.

Since watching Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca last week, I have had similar daydreams about hunting down whoever greenlit the actor Armie Hammer’s yellow suit which is incomprehensibly ubiquitous at the start of this altogether dismaying new stab at Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Why on earth (I will demand) would Max de Winter, the enigmatic, aristocratic widower, cavort around Monte Carlo in this Dijon nightmare for several days in a row? Did he not pack a spare? What is meant by it? It’s quite something to have your film torpedoed by a tweed three-piece in its opening ten minutes, but this Rebecca For Dummies has more where that came from.

Appearing in the film’s main role is Lily James as an innocent, unnamed lady’s maid who falls in with de Winter over oysters at breakfast (don’t ask). In these opening scenes, the character’s wide-eyed misadventures with French, food, and a forbidding boss give the film an unfortunate Emily In Monaco vibe. De Winter and the girl start courting and, although the performers’ chemistry is not evident onscreen, it isn’t long before she becomes the tongs to his Hammer in a sex scene on a sunlit beach.

This, and the film’s other additions to the source material, would not matter if it was presented with any confidence—after all, it does not have to be an exact retread of Hitchcock's classic. But the departures from the book seem to derive from a want of confidence, and they testify to the film’s lack of engagement with the novel. When the couple marry and repair to Manderley, de Winter’s country pile, the new bride is soon visited by nightmares which feature Rebecca, the previous Mrs de Winter. One such vision sees James’s character falling into a pit of leaves in the hallway. This phantasmagoria is laughable, not because it is tasteless or badly made (although it is both those things) but because it renders overt what is hinted at in the novel.

This goes for the whole film: Wheatley cannot see a grain of subtext but he has to blow it up like glass. So it is when Rebecca’s cousin, Jack Favell (Sam Riley, in the movie’s only good performance, giving it a bit of the old Ealing Studios), taunts de Winter that he must have been driven mad by “sharing your missus with all us chaps”. Or, again, when the new bride imagines being surrounded by freaky figures all chanting, “Rebecca! Rebecca!” at her, like a crowd scene in a school play. So it is too with that early sex scene. Viewers should be able to pick up on their own that the protagonists have a strong sexual connection; that the new wife is daunted by her responsibilities; that Rebecca’s aura haunts her; or that Rebecca had been promiscuous.

This depressing trowelling-on of the story’s central themes appears to stem from a lack of understanding of its peculiarities: the film has no feel for class, place, sex or power dynamics; it conveys no anguish or suspense; the Gothic is nowhere to be seen. This has the effect of drastically minimising the story’s impact. How, for instance, are we to understand the crazed behaviour of Manderley's forbidding housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas, always under- or over-acting, but nothing in between) Her characterisation as a pinched, fairly normal woman makes no sense when she finally turns deranged arsonist.

Take a crucial scene in which the new Mrs de Winter breaks a china doll, and is afraid to be found out, before finally being confronted by her husband and Mrs Danvers. This is a trivial occurrence but it matters to the story, giving us a sense of the main character’s crippling discomfort and showing her disquieting dynamic with the maniacally proprietorial Danvers. Hitchcock duly draws out all the tension in the episode with exciting chiaroscuro lighting, neurotic performances and dramatic close-ups. In this version the storyline merely peters out in a Downton Abbey-level contretemps in which nobody appears especially upset. Same for the scene in which the new wife angers her husband by wearing a dress of Rebecca’s—this should be a bruising, devastating moment. Wheatley, Hammer and James stack it alarmingly: Wheatley by not building up to the scene properly, and then confusingly blocking the big reveal; the miscast Hammer by clenching his jaw in lieu of acting, and James by making no impression at all. Hitchcock made cinema: what we have here is content.

Rebecca, although it features a few laugh-out-loud moments, was perhaps fine-tuned to be exactly that: a nothing, a mediocrity that you can put on as a backdrop while texting your pals. But its very mediocrity is badness: the film’s garish colour palette, cheap music, senseless grandeur, clomping dialogue and imbecilic coda are offensive, sure, but they are as nothing, finally, to its apologetic anonymity. What was the point of anything here? Where is Wheatley’s drive? What animates him? Like his heroine at Manderley, Wheatley is plainly uncomfortable in this sort of big joint; perhaps he needs a kindly Danvers to figuratively burn down this pointless creation and let him start again.