My Cousin Rachel swirls around a deliciously twisty premise: On a sprawling Cornwall estate in the 19th century, a young heir-to-be, Philip Ashley, discovers that his beloved guardian, Ambrose, has died mysteriously while taking the healing sun in Italy.
Philip immediately suspects foul play at the hand of the woman Ambrose married during his sojourn, a distant cousin named Rachel, and determines to take revenge — a plot slightly complicated by the fact that, when she unexpectedly fetches up in England, he falls hopelessly in love with her.
The setup is so irresistible that it’s been done before: Back in the 1950s, Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland played Philip and Rachel in a production memorable mostly for its windswept atmosphere and Burton’s U.S. debut. In this iteration of My Cousin Rachel, Sam Claflin and Rachel Weisz strive to ignite sparks that are alternately hostile, seductive and deceptive.
They succeed only fitfully, with Claflin’s winky-blinky jitters no match for Weisz’s far more layered slow burn. There are more than a few moments of genuine mystery and erotic charge between them, but they seem to dissipate in a production that seems to loosen and flutter just when it should be tightening the screws.
Written and directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Le Week-end), My Cousin Rachel is being marketed with an emphasis on its provenance: It’s based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier, author of The Birds and Rebecca, as the movie’s promotional materials eagerly point out. But unlike Alfred Hitchcock, who leaned into the stylized overstatement of those stories’ theatrically Gothic contours, Michell applies his customary restraint and good taste — usually a boon, but in this case misplaced.
My Cousin Rachel looks terrific, its rural farm scenes evoking the rustic lyricism of Constable and his peers, and Michell has provided generous opportunities for some lively performances from a superb supporting ensemble. As the manipulations and tragic misunderstandings eventually kick into gear, the heretofore inert My Cousin Rachel exerts a force every bit as seductive and disquieting as the title character, who can be coyly enigmatic one moment and disarmingly forthright the next.
But what’s missing is the darkness that informs du Maurier’s work, and that would elevate this story into aesthetically and psychologically vivid cinema.