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CRIMSON PEAK . Directed by Guillermo del Toro, with Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston.
REVIEW: Todd McCarthy
GUILLERMO del Toro tries his elegant best to shake the cobwebs from a musty old genre, but still ends up telling a very traditional and predictable haunted house yarn in Crimson Peak. The gifted fantasy/sci-fi specialist has made a film that’s very bloody, and bloody stylish at that, one that’s certainly unequalled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it’s also conventionally plotted and not scary at all, as it resurrects hoary horror tropes from decades ago to utilise them in conventional, rather than fresh or subversive, ways. It’s a thousand times more elaborate and sumptuous than the most recent demented domicile tale of note, T he Babadook, but not an ounce as frightening or disturbing.
If the devil were indeed entirely in the details, del Toro would have a genre classic on his hands. This is clearly a filmmaker who relishes research and enriching his work with deep-dish references; the story’s first half, set in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, practically groans with the sense of a society about to assert itself broadly on the world stage, of the expansiveness of the incipient Teddy Roosevelt era rooted in industriousness.
At the same time, the screenplay by the director and veteran scribe Matthew Robbins is deeply informed by the tradition of both literary and cinematic gothic melodrama, which in context is used to convey the inbred, diseased and inevitably doomed society of royalty and old world privilege, here represented by a crumbling manse in rural England, the location of the drama’s second half.
But no matter how richly and skilfully this physically seductive venture transports the viewer into its spheres of interest, one is still left with a film dedicated to a sincere and utterly un-ironic use of such chestnuts as an evil sister-in-law poisoning her unsuspecting victim via the tea she continually serves her, a spooky house conveniently being situated miles from the nearest neighbour, strict instructions never to descend beneath the house’s main floor, and a frightened heroine continually sweeping through dark rooms carrying a candelabra.
The one hour of set-up is firmly situated in the real world and is all the better for it. The damsel soon to be distressed is young Edith Cushing (Wasikowska), herself an aspiring writer of gothic melodrama who fancies herself the new Mary Shelley and lives in one of turn-of-the-century Buffalo’s most distinguished homes as the only child of widowed industrialist Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver), who worked his way up the hard way. Although beautiful and highly eligible, Edith remains by temperament more the bookish recluse and still resists the perennial ardent attentions of childhood friend-turned-handsome young doctor Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam).
Weakening her defences, however, is newly arrived Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an Englishman who has come, accompanied by his less congenial older sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Chastain), seeking American backing for a “clay harvester,” a mining machine that will efficiently do the work it takes many men to accomplish. The fine actors on hand all play it straight with absolute conviction in what they’re doing, but the one who best captures the spirit of the times – and plays the one character who sees through the visitors’ ruse – is Beaver, a veteran character actor still not widely enough seen on the big screen.
It’s likely that no previous rendition of this sort of psychologically degenerative and spectrally haunted fright story has ever been served up with so much stylistic sauce as del Toro has poured onto Crimson Peak, so named for the red clay that the Sharpe’s family pile, Allerdale Hall, is built upon and which colourfully, and symbolically, contaminates all it touches.
Crimson Peak feels like a 1946 film made seven decades later; the conventions are all carried over intact from an earlier time, so that only the technical aspects and gore level identify it as a product of its own era. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter