United States, 2015Warning: this review contains some plot spoilers for Crimson Peak. Since the film is new I will not discuss the events of its last act in detail, but if you wish to enter the film entirely unaware of how the story unfolds then I'd suggest returning to this review after seeing the film.
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
I normally avoid discussing the general critical responses and box office performance of films, as I want to review only the film itself, and not the hype or popular opinion surrounding it. But the underwhelming response to Crimson Peak is revealing. Its box office gross thus far is unimpressive, especially coming from a major director like Guillermo del Toro. The critical response has been mixed, with the negative reviews being outright snarky in their dismissal of the film."Over-designed pseudo-gothic crud," one review called it. Another critic notes that "Crimson Peak feels like a 1946 film made seven decades later." He's absolutely right. Aside from a much franker approach to sex and violence than would exist in 1946, Crimson Peak is stubbornly old-fashioned. It very much belongs to a bygone genre - the gothic romance - and how its plot unfolds will not surprise anyone familiar with the genre. There is little postmodern revisionism here. The fact that Crimson Peak has not been enthusiastically received is unsurprising - here is a film largely out of step with modern tastes and expectations.
But while an unironically melodramatic, lavishly designed gothic romance might not be for all tastes, I eat up this nonsense and find Crimson Peak to be a morbid delight. Crimson Peak wears its various influences and generic antecedents proudly. Guillermo del Toro was clearly inspired by the Victorian era gothic literature of the Bronte sisters and Mary Shelley, the Bluebeard fairy tale, Alfred Hitchcock films like Rebecca and Notorious, the gothic campy stylings of the Hammer horror films of the 50s and 60s, and Italian horror of the 60s (known as giallo), famous for their bold colors and focus on sensation over logic. Yet, at the same time that it is a devoted tribute to and continuation of its various forebears, Crimson Peak is wholly a product of Guillermo del Toro's imagination.
Take the opening scene of the film. Our heroine, Edith, is a young girl. Her mother has just passed on from black cholera. Edith is crying in bed when she notices a skeletal specter floating towards her. A black hand grabs the terrified Edith and whispers a warning - beware of crimson peak. It is the ghost of Edith's mother. According to an interview del Toro gave, this scene is based on a ghost story from his own family:
"The opening scene is based on a visitation that my mother experienced. My mother's grandmother died, and when she was a child she was crying in her bed, and she heard the silk of the dress of her grandmother move in the corridor. She smelt her perfume, and she heard the bed springs creak and felt the weight of her grandmother leaning on her back. She jumped up screaming and left the room."The opening titles follow, and like in a classic Disney animation the title is introduced on a grand old book, opening to begin the tale. This is Crimson Peak acknowledging its belonging to an old and well-established literary tradition. Crimson Peak exists entirely within specific generic conventions, yet simultaneously feels like a deeply personal passion project on the part of its creator. Guillermo del Toro's greatest gifts as a storyteller are his imagination and his sincerity. You always gets the sense, watching one of his films, that he deeply believes in and loves the story he is telling. This sincerity is what enlivens all the musty but fun cliches of his gothic tale, and brings to life its ghoulish plot and operatic emotions.
Crimson Peak's opening act is charming and, admittedly, rather heavy-handed. Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is now a young woman in turn of the century New York and an aspiring writer. She writes ghost stories, which she insists are not truly ghost stories but "stories with ghosts in them", where ghosts are actually a metaphor for the past. This is del Toro (clumsily) telling us how to feel about the supernatural element of his own film, in which ghosts are not so much the main event as a manifestation of past tragedies that haunt places and people. But it's oddly meta-textual, and I doubt that someone with visceral supernatural encounters in her past would write of ghosts solely as a metaphor, but I digress. Edith is a brave and spirited woman living a happy, sheltered life with her wealthy industrialist father. Into her life waltzes Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a mysterious baronet from England who is unsuccessfully searching for investors for his mining operations back home. Edith is charmed by this alluringly dark and handsome stranger, even as the audience immediately detects a certain duplicitousness in his manner.
At a ball Thomas and Edith waltz together. This is the scene where Crimson Peak entirely won me over. They hold a candle as they dance - the sign of a good waltz being an unextinguished candle throughout the dance. The camera swoops through the crowd and weaves between the couple, focusing on the flickering but undying candle. It is a grandly romantic sequence reminiscent of old Hollywood filmmaking. Accompanying them on piano is Thomas's sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), and her vivid blood-red gown and quietly predatory demeanor spell trouble.
Soon after, tragedy strikes when Edith's father perishes in an "accident" - which we in the audience know to be murder by an unknown assailant. The murder is quick but shockingly brutal. It earned audible gasps and an "oh sh--" from my theater audience, and horrified cringing from me. Edith, now alone, runs to Thomas's arms. A terrific shot shows Thomas embracing a distressed Edith - the camera tracks behind his back, his black coat swallowing the whole screen and poor Edith in darkness. Clearly she is being unknowingly lured into danger.
Edith marries Thomas and moves to England, settling into his home of Allerdale Hall...but here I must not give too much away. The house is ancient, huge and in ruins. Edith stumbles upon strange clues pointing to some dark secret in her husband's past. Lucille lurks about, behaving like the creepiest in-law ever - and is there something stranger than the love of siblings in her and Thomas's closeness? And then there's the horrific ghostly visitations - are they threatening Edith, or trying to warn her of something? You can probably guess the answer to those questions without seeing the film. But the point is not surprise so much as how beautifully and vividly everything unfolds, and the satisfying intensity of the climax.
The three lead roles are expertly performed. Mia Wasikowska is an excellent heroine in the Victorian mold - innocent and feminine, though not helpless or dumb like many of the distressed damsels of similar stories. Tom Hiddleston is perfectly cast as the Byronic antihero (or villain?). Most impressive is Jessica Chastain as the evil sister-in-law. She's a Mrs. Danvers-esque scheming, uptight villainness until the last act, where the true extent of her insanity and hatred is revealed. Then she's all over-the-top fury and raging lust, and Chastain commits to the character fully. Like Kathy Bates in Misery, Chastain will have you giggling uncomfortably one moment and scared into silence the next. Copare this performance to her angelic mother in The Tree of Life and you'll see Chastain's amazing range as a performer.
One of the recurring criticisms of Crimson Peak is that it values "style over substance". The old "style over substance" complaint is a lazy critical shorthand that needs to die. A movie's "style" - cinematography, design, music, editing - is part of its "substance"! And the "style" of Crimson Peak happens to tell much of the story. Look at the costume design as one example. Edith's gowns are all cheery colors - gold, violet - while Lucille's are dramatic red or deep blue. Lucille wears corsets and pulls her hair up tightly, as if she's restraining herself by force. When she shows her true colors her hair is flowing freely, and she's wearing a loose, billowing gown - as if she can finally unleash all she's been repressing. It's costume design as character building. Even the sound of Crimson Peak tells a story. Edith pulls out a hair pin and it sounds like a sword being unsheathed. Lucille scrapes a spoon along the bottom of a bowl of porridge and it sounds like a knife. Domestic items foreshadowing the violence to come - and gothic romance as a genre is all about the horrors that can arise from domestic spaces.
Yet the standout element of Crimson Peak is the house itself, Allerdale Hall. Guillermo del Toro had a real, intricately detailed 3-story house built for the film's production. It is a marvelous movie set that contributes invaluably to the atmosphere and menace of the film. Allerdale Hall is nicknamed Crimson Peak for the red clay surrounding it, which dyes the snow red in winter and oozes through the floorboards like a manifestation of the Sharpes' guilt. The house is rotting - a giant hole in the roof lets in falling leaves and snow. The place symbolizes the Sharpes themselves - a desperate old aristocratic family, a dying remnant of the Old World order. Like many other gothic stories, much of the horror of Crimson Peak comes from a dying aristocracy becoming predatory in order to survive, but only furthering its own doom. And like Guillermo del Toro's past films, the supernatural beings of Allerdale Hall may be grotesque but the real evil there is very human.
