Dangerous black widow or victim of distrust?

WHO is Rachel of the Gothic romance mystery, My Cousin Rachel?

First, meet Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games) as 24-year-old Philip Ashley, an orphaned aristocrat in mid-19th century England raised from young by his adored wealthy landowner cousin Ambrose (also Claflin in brief flashbacks). Ambrose, while in Italy's Florence to nurse his failing health, meets and marries Rachel, another distant cousin. His love-struck letters home soon turn paranoid, claiming his bride is wicked and predatory and begging Philip to come rescue him.

Too late. Ambrose is suddenly dead, murdered, Philip believes, by Rachel.

"I want justice for Ambrose!" he seethes.

But then Rachel arrives to visit her late husband's remote seaside manor in Cornwall county, appearing shimmering against a moonlit window, a vision brought to life by the British actress Rachel Weisz.

Even Philip's dogs are taken with the charming, witty, bewitching stranger, following her up to her bedroom at night. What more Philip? He becomes hopelessly smitten, and transfers to her the entire estate he will inherit from Ambrose on his 25th birthday a day away: Ambrose has curiously left Rachel nothing.

Does Philip not know the love stories by English author Daphne du Maurier never end well? Du Maurier's tales of twisted passions are irresistible to filmmakers. Alfred Hitchcock made classics of Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963), and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) is another masterpiece.

The 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel was previously filmed as a 1952 star vehicle for Richard Burton and Olivia De Havilland. Is the titular beauty a dangerous manipulative gold-digging black widow, killing her way to a family fortune, or a victim of narrow-minded distrust simply for being an intelligent independent woman?

Is she villainess or innocent?

Back to the question at the start: who is Rachel?

That is the central enigma skillfully preserved by writer-director Roger Michell in the current adaptation thanks to Weisz's marquee performance of dark, sensual menace. This Rachel is entrancing. Her vocal intonations and facial expressions are ambiguous, her motives inscrutable and further clouded by Philip's unreliable point-of-view narration.

Philip is rash, insecure, petulant. He chafes at the warnings of his concerned guardian Kendall (Iain Glen) and Kendall's daughter Louise (Holliday Grainger), who is devoted to him, and drinks up the "teas" Rachel brews him like they were chicken soup for the soul, not once suspecting they could be poison.

The unworldly lad has never known a woman. Michell, although most successful for the 1999 rom-com Notting Hill, also directed the 2003 psycho-sexual drama The Mother starring Weisz's husband Daniel Craig, and this movie again has Oedipal undertones. It is a handsomely produced, voluptuously scored period suspense melodrama with hidden letters, dubious wills, whispered infidelities (Pierfrancesco Favino as Rachel's maybe-paramour) and rocky windswept vistas.

There are potboiler effects such as a necklace snapping, its pearls bouncing, slow-mo, down a staircase.

What remains unbroken are the pleasing old-fashioned intrigues, as well as the femme fatale's haunting hold.

Rating: B