The first trailer for Netflix's new adaptation of the classic novel Rebecca has arrived and it looks like a remake worth waiting for.
Directed by Ben Wheatley, with a screenplay by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, based on the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier, the new film stars Lily James, Armie Hammer, Kristin Scott Thomas, Keeley Hawes, and Sam Riley.
The release date is October 21, just in time for Halloween, and Netflix’s synopsis reads: "After a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo with handsome widower Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), a newly married young woman (Lily James) arrives at Manderley, her new husband’s imposing family estate on a windswept English coast.
"Naive and inexperienced, she begins to settle into the trappings of her new life but finds herself battling the shadow of Maxim’s first wife, the elegant and urbane Rebecca, whose haunting legacy is kept alive by Manderley’s sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas)."
We doubt if the new version will outclass Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated 1940 version starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, but the trailer does ratchet up the tension and creepiness very effectively.
