My Cousin Rachel (2017) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Mystery | Romance

Tagline: It’s Kiss or Be Killed

When a young Englishman finds that his guardian has died, he decides that the blame lies with one person and one person only, his cousin Rachel. However, getting to the bottom of the truth becomes much more difficult than he ever anticipated. It's not long before Rachel, with her considerable beauty and charm, has him doubting everything that he ever believed. But his allegiance comes at a cost; if he gets burnt by Rachel, he could lose everything.

Storyline: A young Englishman plots revenge against his late cousin's mysterious, beautiful wife, believing her responsible for his death. But his feelings become complicated as he finds himself falling under the beguiling spell of her charms.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by By Mahohla Dargis on June 8, 2017 -- My Cousin Rachel is good enough to make you wish it were better. Set in the 1830s, it is the story of Philip Ashley (Sam Claflin), a callow, moist-eyed British gentleman farmer who — as he explains in voice-over — has been raised without women. Orphaned as a child, he has been ushered into a wholly male realm by his guardian, Ambrose (also Mr. Claflin), on a swath of land stretching to the coast, a rough and wild paradise, with thundering horses, heaving waves and jagged cliffs, that cries out for death and dark poetry.

At least these bluffs should cry, given the emotional terrain that the director, Roger Michell, stakes out early with one lovely landscape shot after another, the airborne camera sailing over the luxuriant, seemingly endless green. All that natural beauty does its part to draw you in, as do the tight introductions, which Philip narrates with concision over radiant images from his formative years. By the time the story gets going, Philip is nearing 25 and in mourning after learning that Ambrose has died abroad. The cause is a tumor, although Philip believes the real culprit may be a woman he doesn’t know: Ambrose’s British-Italian wife, Rachel (Rachel Weisz).

A young man, a strange woman and an unsettled death that may be a murder — My Cousin Rachel vibrates with possibility. That’s especially the case when Rachel arrives in Britain, sweeping into the family manor, wearing widow’s weeds and a Mona Lisa smile. The story’s gift and its lever, Rachel is the enigmatic, perhaps unknowable woman whose ambiguity is at once a kind of freedom (for her, at least in part) and a cause for suspicion (for everyone else, though chiefly Philip). She quickly pries open both the story and Philip, setting loose the emotions that had been straining beneath all the polite manners and smiles, the buttoned-up clothing and desires.

Mr. Michell keeps everything too buttoned-up in My Cousin Rachel. The new movie looks and sounds quite fine, and there’s a certain easy pleasure that comes from revisiting cinematically enhanced 19th-century Britain, with its silky frocks, perfectly cut posies and apparently happy peasants. It’s all very pretty, but too often the movie’s beauty isn’t tethered to deep feeling or strong ideas, one reason you may often find your eyes and thoughts drifting away from the quietly escalating drama toward the vast green fields, the majestic horses and nice detail work.

That’s too bad, because there’s a juicy story here that keeps trying to slither out alongside the sexual politics, a tale of male sexual innocence that — as Philip falls for Rachel — becomes a study in male hysteria. Or perhaps that’s not what it is; much depends on whether you believe that Philip is a reliable narrator or one of those dissemblers who’s so good at lying to the world because he’s incapable of telling himself the truth. For the most part, Mr. Michell slyly keeps you guessing as to who did what to whom, and whether Rachel is a man-killer or a wronged woman, or if Philip, having been brought up without women, has been bred to fear, worship and finally hate them.

My Cousin Rachel is based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier (1907-89), whose strong narratives, flair for ambiguity and Gothic tendencies make her a natural fit for the big screen. Alfred Hitchcock turned her novel “Rebecca” into a thriller with Joan Fontaine and a brooding Laurence Olivier. Hitchcock also adapted du Maurier’s story The Birds (he had less happy results when he took on her novel Jamaica Inn); Nicholas Roeg turned another du Maurier story into Don’t Look Now. And while an earlier version of My Cousin Rachel (1952) doesn’t rank alongside these films, it does have two perfect stars: Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton.

[CSW] -1.3- This romantic thriller is a nicely crafted work with the key questions that are, by design, nearly as opaque at the film's conclusion. But for a film about romantic obsession, it is decidedly lacking in sizzle, sexual or otherwise. The plot proceeds along an engaging but in no way surprising path right up until the end, when it injects an unanticipated dose of doubt into all that has come before. Though contradictory is not ambiguous but merely contradictory. No plausible explanation to the central mystery is particularly satisfying. Repressed memories? Homosexuality? Pedophilia? Did she? Didn't she? As much as I enjoyed My Cousin Rachel, by the end I didn't particularly care if she did or didn't or if anything else was true. Great acting and stunningly beautiful cinematography ... but to what end?
[V-A] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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