When Mrs. de Winter Was Alive
A Reluctant Review of Rebecca (2020)
Spoiler Warning for Rebecca, Rebecca (1940), and Rebecca (2020).
Trigger Warning for abuse, violence, murder, incest, and suicide.
Lest you begin to believe this blog has become a du Maurier stan account — and I do get why you might be led to that conclusion — I am in the course of writing another article which I’m hoping will be super long and amusing and all of the great. But I’m also hoping I can get this out of my system and move on. This should be short. Or long. It will be as long or as short as it ends up being. Okay. Let’s do this. (Ugh.)
To be completely fair it actually wasn’t as much of a slog as I thought it would be. And it’s very pretty. I won’t say I won’t rewatch it because I literally own a copy of Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera and we all know what a mess that led to. But really, why should I rewatch it when I have the audiobook, access to the novel itself, and can watch the Hitchcock 1940 movie with Laurence Olivier any time I please?
Which leads me to the really easy point here that a lot of other reviewers already hit upon. Rebecca (2020) is haunted and overshadowed by the far more elegant and mysterious Rebecca (1940). Even as this was apparently an early Hitchcock before he was established as the…
