Netflix's Rebecca Trailer Released

On Tuesday, Netflix released the new trailer for Rebecca, the upcoming romantic thriller from director Ben Wheatley. The film is a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock film from 1940, which was an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic novel. According to the official description, "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). Directed by Ben Wheatley (High Rise, Free Fire) and produced by Working Title Films (Emma, Darkest Hour), Rebecca is a mesmerizing and gorgeously rendered psychological thriller based on Daphne du Maurier's beloved 1938 gothic novel."

Rebecca was Hitchcock's first American production, and it earned Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Cinematography and nine other Oscar nominations that year. The original film starred Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson.

Wheatley is directing from a screenplay by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse. His previous genre films include Kill List, A Field in England, and High-Rise James said in the past that having both Wheatley and Goldman working on the movie amplified various components of her character "so that you feel the complexity of who she is."

Scott Thomas said she practically begged to play Mrs. Danvers in the remake. "I wanted that mixture of jealousy, of envy, of rage!" the actress said. "You feel she's a woman of catastrophically reduced circumstances."

She also enjoyed the allure of the conflict between generations of characters and "the older woman despising the younger woman" concept.

Wheatley's film will take a different approach to the source material than Hitchcock's did. "We're doing an adaptation for today, with the idea that women aren't necessarily the weaker sex," Scott Thomas said.

Wheatley told Entertainment Weekly, "Being a massive film fan, it kind of called back to classic Hollywood stuff as much as anything I wanted to do something romantic and I wanted to stretch that muscle, because it's all well and good making lots of movies with horror and action in them, but that's not the whole spectrum of experiences. When I read the script, I realized that a lot of the things I thought I knew about Rebecca were wrong. I fell for all the twists and I thought I knew better than the script and I didn't."

Wheatley's new take on Rebecca debuts on Netflix on October 21st.