Rebecca (Netflix, 2020)
Spoilers alert. As someone who neither read the novel nor saw the other cinematic interpretation of said novel, I began viewing Netflix's Rebecca with a blank slate for a mind. Netflix occasionally produces worthy films, why wouldn't this one be one of those? I am an optimist. The film starts out benignly enough with a forgettable and naive protagonist, an unnamed young woman of middling looks wading through the mire of class warfare that in a typical British stiff upper lip fashion comes with polite smiles and the biting disdain for "the staff" in particular and the poor at large. The young woman works as a companion for an older woman of means who mocks the protagonist mercilessly yet is incapable of seeing her own pandering to the rich when the other protagonist, Mr. Maxim De Winter, a nobleman of considerable means, appears at the same hotel to nurse his heartbreak on the continent. The unnamed woman and Mr. De Winter begin a whirlwind unlikely romance that ends