My Cousin Rachel

The reviews for this film were excellent and I was looking forward to seeing it at the cinema, but unfortunately it disappeared from general release pretty quickly.

I finally saw it on DVD over the Christmas holidays and suggested we screen it, but the curse of the best films that you didn't see seems to have struck again: our screening clashed with the arrival of the Beast from the East and we had an audience of just seven - and three of us were committee members.


My Cousin Rachel

UK 2017          106 minutes

Director:          Roger Michell

Starring:            Rachel Weisz, Sam Clafin, Iain Glen and Holliday Grainger

Awards and Nominations

• Nomination for Best Actress (Rachel Weisz) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• One win and three further nominations

“My Cousin Rachel is a highly enjoyable mystery thriller of the sort that modern communication and the internet have made impossible to set in the present day. Based on the 1951 novel by Daphne du Maurier and adapted and directed by Roger Michell, it is a fantastically preposterous psychological drama featuring a lush score from Rael Jones and a tremendous lead performance from Rachel Weisz – who is mean, minxy and manipulative. Her sheer charisma persuades you to overlook one or two plot glitches. I can only describe this film as the roistering missing link between The Talented Mr Ripley and Far from the Madding Crowd.”

Peter Bradshaw

Philip (Sam Clafin) plots revenge against his late cousin’s mysterious wife Rachel (Rachel Weisz), as he feels that she is responsible for his death while he is recuperating in Italy after an illness. However when Rachel returns to the family estate in Cornwall Philip finds himself falling for her charms.

The film appeared at number fifty in The Guardian’s list of the Best Films of 2017 as well as featuring in its list of the Best Films of 2017 That You Didn’t See.  In this latter list Benjamin Lee was particularly impressed by Rachel Weisz’s performance:

“If this were a just world, and 2017 has proved that it most definitely is not, then Rachel Weisz’s name would be frequently heard throughout this year’s awards season. Her performance in Roger Michell’s curiously ignored My Cousin Rachel, the second adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 novel, is one of her best: a compelling, fiery take on a spell-bindingly unknowable literary femme fatale, disarming and enigmatic, charming and bewitching.”

Daphne du Maurier’s novel was published in 1951 although the story is set in a Hardy-esque nineteenth century. The novel was an international success and this led in 1952 to a film adaptation directed by Henry Koster and starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton, his first role in a US film. George Cukor had originally intended to direct the film but both he and du Maurier found the screenplay unfaithful to the novel, although on its release critics felt it was a worthy adaptation. Many of du Maurier’s other novels and short stories have also adapted well to the cinema: Hitchcock filmed Jamaica Inn (1939) and, far more successfully, Rebecca (1940) as well as the short story The Birds (1963), while Nicholas Roeg adapted another short story for his classic Don’t Look Now (1973).

Roger Michell began his career as a stage director working at the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His first work for TV was an adaptation Hanif Kureishi’s autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia. His first film as director for cinema was Notting Hill (1999), and his cinema films since then have included The Mother (2003) written by Hanif Kureishi and starring Daniel Craig, Enduring Love (2004) and Venus (2006) once again from a script by Hanif Kureishi. In 2006 Michell was in negotiations in 2006 to direct Daniel Craig as James Bond in A Quantum of Solace, but the talks fell through.

Here's a link to the trailer: