★★★
(PG) 105 minutes
No one would deny the novelist Daphne du Maurier knew how to spin a tale, the best-known example being Rebecca, filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940, with Joan Fontaine as a meek bride forced to compete with the memory of her husband's first wife.
Du Maurier's later novel, My Cousin Rachel, is a variation on some of the same themes – and while writer-director Roger Michel (Notting Hill) is not exactly Hitchcock, his new adaptation generates a fair degree of pleasurable intrigue.
We're in the mid-19th century on the coast of Cornwall, site of a country estate that the hero Philip Ashley (Sam Claflin) inherits from his cousin and guardian Ambrose, who married unexpectedly not long before his death.
When Ambrose's widow Rachel (Rachel Weisz) arrives in England, Philip is primed for suspicion – but, against his better judgment, finds himself falling under her spell.
A filmmaker of some panache, Michel uses a varied bag of stylistic tricks to create a romantic mood and at the same time put us on edge – old-fashioned dissolves on the one hand, nervously energetic hand-held camera work on the other. But despite his resourcefulness, the pace flags halfway through: while everything hangs on the question of how far Rachel is to be trusted, we know this will only be answered at the last moment, if at all.
Meanwhile the film amounts to a duel between the leads, who are not quite equally matched. Claflin, a not untalented actor, seems bent on embodying the full range of romance-novel archetypes: in Me Before You he is a wounded, sneering aristocrat; in the recent Their Finest, a dry stick waiting to be set alight. Here, the character type is "impetuous young puppy" – the kind who expresses frustration by knocking a table to the ground, or moodily tossing away a washcloth.
He's ridiculous, but at least the film seems to be aware of it. In any case, My Cousin Rachel belongs to Weisz, in a role that capitalises on her gift for showing multiple layers of emotion. When we first meet Rachel she's hesitant and humble, picking her way through her sentences. Then her sense of mischief emerges – and before long, we're led to see her as a woman whose complex nature blurs simple distinctions between the false and the sincere. It would be only natural to watch her closely, even if each tremor of a facial muscle didn't supply a potential key to the plot.