A Flat 'Rebecca' Remake For Netflix Is Haunted By The Ghost Of Hitchcock
Netflix's adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's swooning gothic novel strips it of subtext — and sex — and tacks on a ending that misunderstands the "romance" at its center.
The amount of enjoyment you get out of Netflix's wan remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 swooning gothic romance Rebecca depends entirely on how familiar you are with that original film, and the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier from which it was adapted.
(Side note: The filmmakers of the Netflix version maintain they are simply re-adapting ... and updating ... the novel, and pointedly not attempting to remake Hitchcock — but as they've preserved several of the alterations he made to the story, that assertion has more holes in it than the title character's doomed sailboat. But we'll come to that.)
If you go into this Netflix retread with nothing to compare it to, it'll go down easy enough. It's pretty to look
