Genre regular Ben Wheatley follows in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock with his upcoming adaptation of Dame Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel REBECCA (pick up a copy HERE), which Hitchcock first brought to the screen in 1940. (You can buy Hitchcock's film HERE.) Wheatley's REBECCA will be available to watch on the Netflix streaming service as of October 21st – and while doing press for the film, the director revealed that he has made another movie since working on REBECCA.
Little White Lies reports that Wheatley made the currently-untitled film during the pandemic lockdown, shooting it "in 15 spare days back in August". Wheatley told them he wrote the script "just to keep [his] head together with lockdown happening."
According to the site,
Wheatley describes the film as a response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the result of a datedness that he perceived in the titles released to VOD that couldn’t take the new status quo into account. Naturally, his coronavirus film will fall under the umbrella of horror, a fitting choice with no shortage of horrifying things having come to dominate day-to-day life.
We'll keep you updated as more is revealed about Wheatley's lockdown movie. In the meantime, his take on REBECCA is described as "a mesmerising and gorgeously rendered psychological thriller". The synopsis:
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).
Wheatley's other directing credits include DOWN TERRACE, KILL LIST, SIGHTSEERS, A FIELD IN ENGLAND, HIGH-RISE, FREE FIRE, and HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD.