Crimson Peak, a Guillermo del Toro Gothic Romance in High Bloody Style
"Beware of Crimson Peak!" So goes the warning hissed by one of the skeletal, agitated ghosts appearing in the movie of the same title. It isn’t bad advice. Not that I’m saying you should avoid
Crimson Peak the new film from Guillermo del Toro, modern cinema’s No. 1 genre geek. On the contrary: If you know what you’re getting into and you’re in the mood for blood, velvet and a director’s sincere commitment to excess, then this might be just the ticket.
In spite of the aforementioned ghosts,
Crimson Peak isn’t really a horror film. The supernaturalism is, as it were, a red herring, and a chance for Mr. del Toro to indulge in some creepy effects and easy shocks. The specters are visible to Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), a sensible young woman coming of age in Buffalo around the turn of the 20th century. She is periodically visited by the inky, anxious wraith of her dead mother, and she incorporates ghosts into a novel she’s writing. But otherwise her life seems to obey the conventions of late-Victorian realist fiction. “They’re really metaphors,” she explains of the apparitions in her book, and while Mr. del Toro’s are a bit more literal, they are also secondary to the main story.
Which might be described as a Henry James tale filtered through the lurid sensibilities of the Italian giallo maestro Mario Bava. Characters are swathed in rich dark cloth — except for Edith’s blazing yellow frocks — and lighted by candelabras. Wind howls, blood seems to ooze down walls and up from beneath floorboards, and coherence is sacrificed to sensation. Like one of James’s heroines, Edith, who lives with her doting industrialist father (Jim Beaver), is seduced by a penniless aristocrat — an English baronet who has come to Buffalo with his weird sister in search of venture capital and an innocent bride. Edith has another suitor, a bland ophthalmologist named Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), but he is no match for Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who whisks her off to his ancestral estate, a crumbling pile that is sometimes referred to as (cue sinister music) Crimson Peak. (I thought it was going to turn out to be a brand of high-performance cinnamon sports gum, but that’s because I live in the cynical, seen-it-all, brand-conscious world that Mr. del Toro longs to escape.)
The Sharpe mansion sits on a clay mine that leaches lurid red goo into the pipes, the courtyard and the basement. The walls are festooned with fluttering moths, reminders of Mr. del Toro’s career-long preoccupation with insects of various sizes and dispositions. But the scariest thing in the house is not the crimson tide or the pre-modern plumbing, not the bugs or the screeching ghosts or the howling wind. It is Jessica Chastain, her hair as black as a raven’s wing, her eyes as mad as cracked marbles, her remarkable chin poised to trouble the sleep of the righteous.
Ms. Chastain plays Lucille Sharpe, Thomas’s sister, roommate and sharer of a Very Dark Secret. The nature of this secret is both hinted at and shrouded, but it does not take much of a sleuth to discern that some terrible things have happened in Crimson Peak. (Hence the warning issued by Edith’s ghostly mother.) Before Edith went off with Thomas — and before something else really awful happened — her father hired a private detective (Burn Gorman), who unearthed some alarming tidbits about the Sharpe siblings. Fearing the worst, Dr. McMichael sets out to rescue Edith, only to find …
But why spoil anything? Best to get lost in the tangle of the plot, to puzzle over loose ends and then wonder if this lush hothouse flower was really worth cultivating.
Crimson Peak works hard to supply the kind of gothic, romantic, creepy-erotic mood that is not quite the staple of popular culture that it used to be. Mr. del Toro overdoes it, as is his habit, overselling his own enthusiasm for the material in a way that compromises the audience’s delight. The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.
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