Rebecca (2020)

“Show me an eligible bachelor and I’ll show you a room full of women acting like they’ve lost their minds.” – Mrs. Van Hopper

Number of Times Seen – 1 (22 Oct 2020)

Brief Synopsis – A young women meets a rich widower and falls in love with him despite the fact that his previous wife died under very suspicious circumstances.

My Take on it – I have never understood the Hollywood phenomena of making remakes and reboots of older movies.

In most cases, the new film is completely unnecessary and that is the case in this instance.

The original film directed by Alfred Hitchcock was able to win Best Picture in 1940.

It was a much more compelling version of this story and stays much more interesting than they are able to do here.

This movie does have a very impressive cast led by Armie Hammer, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Unfortunately, they aren’t able to help make this story more compelling or engaging to watch unfold especially given the fact that the chemistry between the leads is far too weak to make things seem more realistic and believable.

The location shooting and production values of this film help make us believe the time and place of these events which works well.

Ben Wheatley is a great director of action films, but he seems much too out of his depth with this kind of film.

Even the thrilling aspects of the story don’t work as well here as they did when Hitchcock staged this same story 80 years ago.

This is further proof that a remake of a classic film, isn’t always a way to enhance an old story and that modern filmmaking techniques aren’t also better than the simple ones used decades ago.

Bottom Line – Another unnecessary remake. The original film is so much more compelling than this one even if the story is quite similar. The cast here is quite impressive, but they can’t hep make this more engaging which is a bit of a shame. The locations all look great and that helps make us believe the time and place of the story much better. Hammer and James have pretty weak chemistry which also hurts things. Wheatley is a great director, but he isn’t able to make this as thrilling as Hitchcock was able to do 8 decades ago.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – Ben Wheatley also directed Armie Hammer in Free Fire (2016). (From IMDB)

Rating – BAFTA Worthy (5/10)