My Cousin Rachel
(UK/USA, 106 min.)
Written and directed by Roger Michell
Starring: Sam Claflin, Rachel Weisz, Iain Glenn, Holliday
Grainger
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Rachel Weisz My Cousin Rachel.
Photo by Nicola Dove / Fox Searchlight Pictures |
Dead wives and Daphne du Maurier go together like cake and
ice cream. The haunting prose of the popular author is at its best in Rebecca, the story of the nameless
second Mrs. de Winter living in the shadow of her husband’s widow, Rebecca. It’s
a hypnotic Gothic story, but also perhaps the best example of a film being better than
the book. Alfred Hitchcock’s spellbinding psychological thriller and ghost
story is an eerie production that gets inside the head of its jittery
protagonist (Joan Fontaine) as she braves the high bar set by her predecessor,
survives the husband (Laurence Olivier) who might have killed Rebecca, and
unravels under the presence of the loony housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith
Anderson). Death and widows brew in a similar tempest in My Cousin Rachel, albeit without the weirdly sexual storm cloud of Mrs. Danvers.