WEISZ: (As Rachel Ashley) Will you please stop being so polite and get up and go to bed?ĬLAFLIN: (As Philip) Of course. WEISZ: (As Rachel Ashley) You're half asleep.ĬLAFLIN: (As Philip) No, I'm not tired. The clock struck the hour as we drove up and I even seemed to recognize the sound of the bell. I've done it so many times in my imagination. Driving up to the house, he comes standing by the door to welcome me. RACHEL WEISZ: (As Rachel Ashley) Perhaps tomorrow I could borrow a horse and have a look around.

He sits in a chair, puffing on his pipe while a dog stretches itself nearby and listens as she speaks of the estate she has never seen before. Instead he finds a modest, seemingly ingenuous soul, and he's totally lost. When Rachel, played by Rachel Weisz, arrives, he goes to her room for a confrontation. Philip lost his mother at an early age and is both wildly needy and spoiled, but Claflin maybe overdoes it. In Roger Michell's movie, Sam Claflin plays Philip is so unstable that you might find yourself cringing. So we're seeing a woman's take on a man's take of a possible femme fatale. But it's worth pointing out that although the narrator is a man, the author of the book is a woman. This is either the most obvious black widow plot imaginable or something else is going on. She also makes a peculiar medicinal tea, and every time he drinks it he gets unaccountably weak. Cousin Rachel is vivacious, attentive and amusing. She comes to the estate he's about to inherit.

Philip hasn't met Rachel, but he knows she's a monster. The book is narrated by a callow 24-year-old Englishman named Philip who comes to believe that his wealthy guardian and cousin Ambrose was murdered by Ambrose's new wife, who also happens to be a cousin, a very distant cousin named Rachel.

Film critic David Edelstein has this review.ĭAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: Daphne du Maurier's 1951 novel 'My Cousin Rachel' is very sly. Another novel of hers that became a film was 'My Cousin Rachel,' first in 1952 with Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton, and now with Rachel Weisz as the title character, a widow who might have designs on a fortune. The English author Daphne Du Maurier is most famous for her 1938 novel 'Rebecca,' which was turned into an Oscar-winning film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

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