And I know that I have made the right decision. And as I sit before the mirror in our stuffy little room in Cairo - just another stop on our quest to find a real home - I can see the woman I am now.
Danvers, and of Rebecca.īut this morning I woke up and left the dead behind. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
And then she wakes up, and this is what we hear as her voiceover continues: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” says Lily James in voiceover, as she plays our unnamed heroine frowning in her sleep. And I’m going to spoil for you exactly how Wheatley reprises that line, because the way you feel about this choice will determine whether or not this Rebecca is a waste of your time. But unlike other versions of Rebecca, Wheatley’s comes back around to that opening line again at the very end of the film. Wheatley’s Rebecca begins with that perfect opening line, just as Hitchcock’s adaptation did before it. (Hitchcock’s 1940 Rebecca does it beautifully, outside of the Hayes Code-mandated hash it makes of the ending.) But Netflix’s messy and disappointing new film adaptation of Rebecca, directed by Ben Wheatley, doesn’t come anywhere close to pulling it off. That sense of corrosive nostalgia is where du Maurier’s Rebecca starts, and an ideal adaptation of the novel would find a way to recreate that mood on film. Manderley, the object of her fetishistic obsession, is gone now. This is a story told by a sad, dry woman living a sad, dry life. You read the rest of Rebecca to find out what happened to Manderley, and you know that anything encountered after Manderley can only be a disappointment. What’s left now is only a sense of lost luxury and decay and corruption, of a once-great house gone dark and moldering. Gothic horror lives and dies by its elisions, by what cannot be said, and there is so much unspoken here. Then she goes on to describe the small, sad life she lives now in exile, and you know something awful must have happened for her to end up here. Rebecca, the 1938 gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier, has one of those perfect opening lines: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”Īs the first chapter continues, the narrator goes on to describe walking into the country house of Manderley: how it was once perfect and now is ruined, how it used to be hers to love and luxuriate in.
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