'My Cousin Rachel' A Review

My Cousin Rachel is a Gothic melodrama about an orphan Philip(Sam Claflin) raised by his cousin Ambrose on a English estate. Ambrose, suffering an illness, travels to Italy for the warmer climate. There he meets a distant relative Rachel(Rachel Weisz) who he falls in love with an marries. Letters home to Philip are initially bubbling then turn dark, Philip goes to investigate but is too late as Ambrose has died allegedly from a brain tumor. Returning to England as the owner of the estate Philip distrusts Rachel and prepares to confront her when she eventually arrives for a visit. However when she does arrive the situation is much more complicated than it first appeared. One of the poster tag lines is "Kiss or KILL?"

Weisz is wonderful, sultry and charming, fierce and compassionate. She keeps you guessing as to her motives, is able to fluidly change tactics scene to scene in a way that makes you believe she's a murder one minute, suspicions totally false the next. She also imparts what would be, during the time, a proto-feminist courage which turns the whole film on an interesting slant. Claflin is not nearly as successful, handsome and with no small amount of movie-star magnetism he simply can't pull off the oscillation the character requires. What should be a decent into paranoid madness and obsession comes off more like petulance and immaturity. He's not bad just inappropriately cast and because of that Weisz can only do so much to make the story work.

Visually the film feels very authentic. Excellent costumes and lots of scenes and shots of simple manual labor on the estate. There is no reticence about showing how dirty that time period could be and was which is incredibly refreshing for a period piece. The score is uneven at some points heightening at some points, especially "big" moments, distracting. The film is intriguing, no doubt, and has some very odd moments that are surprising and baffling if not quite compelling.

Weisz enlivens a somewhat irregular period yarn.

Rent It.