Rebecca, review: Lily James, wild romance, mysterious glamour – sound familiar?

• Dir: Ben Wheatley. Cast: Lily James, Armie Hammer, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ann Dowd, Sam Riley, Tom Goodman-Hill, Bill Paterson. 12A cert, 122 min   

If there were any lingering doubts that Lily James was capable of taking the Joan Fontaine role in a new version of Rebecca, recent events in Rome surely dispelled them for good. Popping up in a glamorous corner of southern Europe on the arm of a wealthy older man who owns an imposing home in the south west of England? This girl is the Daniel Day-Lewis of Second Mrs de Winters.

Yet even setting aside the, ahem, fortuitous timing of James’s headline-grabbing clinch with the actor Dominic West last weekend, when it comes to adapting Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic romance, stepping into someone else’s still-warm shoes is all part of the deal. Any new take is doomed to be compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful original, with Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, which for the last 80 years has essentially been a Mrs de Winter Number One in film form: whatever they try, it’s the one that just can’t be surpassed.

Nevertheless, this latest contender gives it a heroic shot. It’s a glossy and easy-to-swallow Working Title production directed by Ben Wheatley, whose flair for the English Eerie was already writ large in films such as Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England. The 2020 Rebecca opens in UK cinemas this weekend before landing on Netflix next Wednesday: the kind of multi-platform scramble for cultural purchase we’ll surely be seeing much more of as the market regains its footing post-Covid.

Not that cinema-goers themselves are likely to find themselves thrown off-balance. Scripted with cool proficiency by Jane Goldman, the film sticks even more closely to Du Maurier’s novel than did Hitchcock’s – who was constrained at the time both by his formidable new Hollywood producer, David O Selznick, and the recently implemented Hays Code, which tightly governed every studio production’s internal moral mechanisms.

Here, the original novel’s more brutal twist is restored, while some of the lesbian subtext around the character of the housekeeper Mrs Danvers – here played by a joyously imperious Kristin Scott Thomas – is coaxed back out into the sunlight. Overall, it’s a highly polished and consistently enjoyable watch that feels a little hemmed in by convention. You can sometimes sense the film gearing up to take a risk, holding its breath, then not quite convincing itself to go through with it.

The casting is certainly as safe as could be. In addition to James as our unnamed heroine and Scott Thomas’s blood-freezing Danvers, there is Armie Hammer as a strapping, preppy, and notably more age-appropriate Maxim de Winter – high society’s most eligible young widower. When James first meets him in Monte Carlo, she’s there as a companion for the grotesque Mrs Van Hopper (Ann Dowd), though ends up spending more time with this debonair yet enigmatic aristo with the build of an Olympic rower.

Dressed in a mustard linen three-piece, Hammer looks like an enormous, human-shaped novelty trophy – and James, with neither fortune nor connections, turns out to be the unlikely young woman to lift him. Yet after the famous “little fool” snap proposal and a whistle-stop honeymoon, Manderley awaits them – as does the first Mrs de Winter’s unbanishable shadow within.

With the cartoonish golden glow of the Riviera behind them, the music that accompanies the newlyweds’ return is a haunting 1960s folk ballad by Pentangle: the kind of thrillingly idiosyncratic choice of a kind you may end up wishing Wheatley’s film would make more often than it does. See also the unexpected attention paid to the lives of the folk below-stairs – which conjures memories of, yes, James’s old stomping ground of Downton Abbey, but also John Schlesinger’s steamy 1967 adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, which was even more engrossed by the rhythms of 19th-century rural life.

It is the earthy, mercurial Schlesinger, rather than the calculating Hitchcock, who feels like a guiding spirit for Wheatley here – while James is much less of a Joan Fontaine than a Julie Christie. The actress’s very modern mix of vulnerability and mettle brings a sexual frisson not only to her relationship with Hammer’s Maxim, but 1930s Cornwall full stop. (She has an enjoyably tense encounter with Sam Riley’s caddish Jack Favell, who oh-so-coincidentally stops by the estate while Maxim is away on business.)

The film does make a point of giving its heroine more to do in its busy final stretch, dispatching her to London on a solo clandestine mission to uncover an important piece of evidence while the climactic scandal unfolds. But in an already hectic last act, the sequence feels too rushed to be empowering, and perhaps makes her relationship with Maxim feel a little more balanced and collaborative than it should.

I know, I know: damned when it does its own thing, damned when it doesn’t. But there’s no contradiction in believing that a fresh and daring retelling of Rebecca was entirely possible with this exact cast and crew, but the fruit of their labours isn’t it. Does that actually matter? Almost certainly not for anyone discovering Du Maurier’s story for the first time, nor for whom two hours of sleek gothic romance counts as an evening well spent, and in this case, it absolutely does.

As for those of us hoping for more weirdness, carnality and menace – well, like Mrs de W Number Two lost in her Manderley memories, one can always dream.

In UK cinemas from Friday and on Netflix from Wednesday October 21