Director: Guillermo del Toro
MPAA Rating: R
Run Time: 119 Minutes
If nothing else, 2015 should be remembered as the most experimental year in studio filmmaking in years. Between big-budget BDSM romantic comedies, post apocalyptic pictures with guitar-flamethrower-wielding dudes and Michael Mann’s nearly avant-garde techno-thriller, every unconventional choice has been fascinating at least, delightful at best. Time to add Guillermo Del Toro’s latest, Crimson Peak, to that list.
As with the film that is oft touted as Del Toro’s masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro utilizes the conventions of a different genre (in this case, haunted house/horror) to tell a deeply complicated, tragic tale. The ghosts, which seem to be at its center, are merely the spiritual anguish within the soul of each of its leads. Crimson Peak delightfully defies visual convention, even when its story falters, unfolding like an especially grim, sensual picture book.
Within its first scenes, Crimson Peak’s gothic, late-Victorian-era setting is introduced. Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is a young aspiring fiction writer and an outsider in her hometown of Buffalo, NY. Viewed as a spinster and an ornery presence amongst other women, she is generally closer to the men in her life – her father, Carson (Jim Beaver), and her potential suitor and close friend Alan (Charlie Hunnam).
When the secretive but utterly captivating Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) enters Buffalo with his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), looking for funding from Carson for an invention, Edith immediately falls for him. Despite warnings from her father and Alan, Edith is eventually swept away to Sharpe’s home in England. It is there she will learn of Thomas and Lucille’s past, see the ghosts that haunt their childhood home and recall a warning from her own youth – but not before it is, in her own words, too late…
Because of its premise, it makes sense that the marketing would focus around the movie’s mysterious paranormal aspects, which eventually become somewhat central to discoveries made in the film’s final act, but Crimson Peak is more gothic melodrama than horror, more tragic romance than fantasy.
It is, at its heart, a film filled with grief. In fact, most of the film’s flaws arguably come from these spectral forces. As a mystery/thriller, Crimson Peak often feels slightly devoid of escalating tension, instead opting to jolt into pure insanity in its third act. Those looking for scares and atmosphere will leave somewhat disappointed; anyone in search of an original story, more so, as a lot of the screenwriting is recycled from better, more emotionally resonant romances and classic horror films.
Despite his penchant for reissuing material best used by superior storytellers, Del Toro continues to be master of visual flair, and this proves to be the least restrained he’s been in a long time. Bizarre editing techniques and camerawork often make the visual tricks within the film unpredictable. (A ridiculous amount of iris in/outs in the film’s first half proves to be one of the bolder and more noticeable techniques utilized.)
Aesthetically, it evokes the age of technicolor films, like those of Powell and Pressburger, as well as Argento’s Suspiria. This choice proves to be an exceptional one, allowing Del Toro to map out his haunted house as an expansive, slowly unfurling playground of secret rooms, creaky dumbwaiter shafts and eerie basements – flashes of primary colors juxtaposed with the shadows and greyness of the wintery landscape.
While Del Toro is the one who builds the playground, his actors get to use it, and they wring every opportunity they can out of the material. Wasikowska and Hiddleston do their standard solid work and complement each other nicely with equally dubious intentions and suppressed passion. Chastain is particularly astonishing, playing the morally suspect Lucille so wonderfully – her work often transcending the inevitable trajectory her character takes. Notes of seeming regret are contradicted by a line or gesture so filled with venom it takes a life of its own. It’s the greatest performance yet from one of the most exciting actors working today.
At its best, Crimson Peak is a gorgeous, near-expressionistic work, where the ghosts and corpses represent something greater than their intended effect. At its worst, it has a tendency to fall into clichéd character exchanges, using blatantly obvious twists and turns as it progresses. But applause should be awarded for such adventurous artistic choices, even when its narrative falters.
