Crimson Peak [MA]

Edith is a budding young American writer working on a ‘ghost story’. But her passions get waylaid when she meets the young, British Thomas Sharp and falls in love with him. Following the violent and untimely death of her father, Edith amply becomes Lady Sharp and moves to England to live with Thomas and his sister in their childhood manor. But life at ‘Crimson Peak’ is not so bright for Edith as she begins to see terrifying spectral figures as soon as she arrives and an old warning from beyond the grave, not heard since her childhood, begins to haunt her again. 

Picture, if you will, a blend of traditional decadent Victorian gothic and something of the 1930s and 40s B horror movies. Thus rises from the bloodied snow, Guillermo del Toro’s newest feature, Crimson Peak. I find myself at odds as to whether I liked this film or not. On the one hand, it’s a visually stunning piece of cinema that spares no expense with the decadence of the gothic and a bit of a return to German expressionism. On the other hand, the story, the script, and to a lesser extent the performances did not offer nearly as much as the direction and the world that surrounded them. They did not pull their weight, so to speak, and there was plenty to pull with those stunning Victorian period costumes! 

Admittedly, I was not entirely aware of the type of film that I was entering the cinema to see tonight. I had got it into my head that this might be a return to the good old-fashioned haunted house story like The Woman In Black. This was definitely not the case. A funnily reflective film in that it mirrors the heroine’s own writing project, which is “not a ghost story, but a story with ghosts in it”, Crimson Peak is definitely a return to the more traditional modes of the gothic genre in it’s exploration of themes such as the corrupt and dysfunctional family, the past intruding on the present (essentially what ghosts are in the gothic), decadence, murder, and madness. As much as I adore the gothic, the film falls down, for me, in its bullet-in-a-whirlwind script. Everything, from the narrative build up and ark to the dialogue is so rushed and almost carelessly thrown onto the film’s generic train tracks. 

The romance between Edith and Thomas is next to non-existent, the ‘hauntings’ seem to be there for the scare effect as well as computer wizards to show some flare, and by the time we reach the meat of the story we are pretty clued in as to how it’s all going to turn out. 

There is a feeling that possibly the actors felt the floundering of the script too, because the performances were sadly mediocre. Mia Wasikowska delivers wonderful crisp wit at the film’s beginning, but as it progresses she loses that spark and her mournful voice-over that bookends the film comes across as a person not really trying. Tom Hiddleston was essentially just Loki with a slightly different vocabulary, top hat, and waistcoat to substitute for his tesseract sabre and horned Asgardian armour. Jessica Chastain’s performance was the one that had sinister intrigue and her channelling of Eva Green worked in her favour. 

HOWEVER, on the bright side, this is a visually stunning piece of cinema. From the very beginning, there are intimations of gorgeous German expressionism of the 1920s except in heightening gemstone colour. Everything is dripping in decadence from the colour scheme, to the costumes, to the lighting. One is truly transported to a Victorian manor without ever leaving one’s seat and it’s beautiful! 

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones, Burn Gorman, Jonathan Hyde, Bruce Gray, Emily Coutts, Alec Stockwell, and Jim Beaver, Crimson Peak is a visually breathtaking film, but one that is sadly let down by a rushed script and half-hearted performances. Filled with romance, drama, horror, stunning special effects, and plenty of gory violence (I had to keep my face covered for many minutes throughout) it’s a film that I’m in two minds about. On the one hand, it’s breathtaking cinematic experience and it delivers the anticipated thrills of the genre. On the other hand, it’s hard to love a movie in which you can’t attach yourself to the characters and moves at ten times that of a freshly shot bullet.