[two-star-rating]
Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver[/two-star-rating]
Every Halloween season – and sometimes beyond – we ache for scares. Maybe some of us like the gore of a bloody, severed limb; others long for the creepy feeling of cold gooseflesh on the backs of our necks. Guillermo del Toro would seem the perfect director to do the latter (Pan’s Labyrinth). Alas, his Crimson Peak is more moods than intrigue, more art direction than directed plot.
“Beware of Crimson Peak!” an apparition direly warns…twice. Perhaps this portent of doom was aimed at the audience.
As a Gothic ghost tale/romance thriller, this film owes a lot to The Fall of the House of Usher and other Victorian-era specter stories. Unfortunately, its clichéd plot – with odd tangential moments and no real surprises – also belongs to that dusty era over a hundred years ago. Here, in our age, it cries for a few more twists and shocks.
Wasikowska is Edith Cushing, the daughter of a self-made American millionaire (Beaver). Hiddleston’s Thomas Sharpe, a baronet – the lowest of British nobility – comes to the US seeking investors in his mining machine. He instead sweeps the young, naïve Cushing girl off her feet. Soon he and his creepy sister (Chastain) are escorting the young woman to their eerie manse in the English countryside.
The elaborate Gothic house sits on a blood-red clay pit, and the structure slowly sinking into the mire…much like the film. Because the baronet and his sis are out of money, their home is also crumbling around them. A large hole in the roof at the center lets the leaves and snow pour into their great hall…like the emptiness of the story at the center of this flick. In truth, the house is a marvel of what del Toro does well: rich, alluring visuals.
The spirits that occupy Crimson Peak are also terrifically terrifying, though del Toro borrows their looks from other films he directed and produced – specifically The Devil’s Backbone and Mama.
Unfortunately, his characters aren’t as beguiling, and he cannot make his plots quite as captivating.
In that thin plot, there’s dirty work afoot; this is a Victorian thriller. Those bloody ghosts wander the estate, black moths cling to the tattered wallpaper, and everything seems to warn the young girl that the siblings – her new husband and his sister – are not what they seem.
Guillermo del Toro has always loaded his films with a multitude of enthralling ideas: murdered souls, disturbing siblings, crumby house, bloody soil, ominous basement, and omnipresent moths. Sometimes it works, as is the case in The Devil’s Backbone. Sometimes, it ends up being a lot of detritus signifying nothing, as it is in Crimson Peak. We long for something horrifying and cumulative – a twisted supernatural climax – and instead, so many things are pretty and spectral red herrings.
[rating-key]
The other big problem here is that the characters are flat and uninteresting. They do not surprise us at all. They hearken back to a simpler era, when their awful deeds and motivations would’ve been more ghastly. Here, the horror is just ho-hum.
Filled to the brim with sumptuous set decorations, special effects, and some nifty cinematography, Crimson Peak is all art and design. The conventional plot and familiar, two-dimensional characters have no possibility of raising our pulses, much less leaving us haunted.
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