Tom Hiddleston has amassed a solid résumé of professional interactions with the supernatural, whether it’s as the Norse villain Loki, a centuries-old hipster vampire, or his current turn as a cunning inventor in Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic horror flick Crimson Peak.
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Enter Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, the mysterious Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain). With snow falling through the roof, red clay bubbling up beneath the floorboards, groans emanating from the walls, and a spindly presence lurking in the shadows, it’s a long way from the honey glow of Edith’s home sweet home. Hunnam, who starred in del Toro’s Pacific Rim, plays Dr. Alan McMichael, a handsome bachelor who has a crush on Wasikowska and immediately distrusts the siblings. This is Edith’s mom, recently deceased and now a computer-generated specter that is more spooky than outright scary.
Cushing’s daughter, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), is an aspiring author, trying to sell her ghost story, but in those days, if a woman turned up with a manuscript, most publishers commented on little more than her handwriting. The only thing that isn’t rendered in faded hues is the scarlet clay that bubbles up through the ground; if it had a Dulux colour swatch it would be Dario Argento Red.
It might not work for people who don’t get the references – it nearly certainly won’t, based on the response from my preview audience – but del Toro isn’t making Crimson Peak for them.
Crimson Peak is to the Golden Age Hollywood adaptations of Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Great Expectations what Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven was to the oeuvre of Douglas Sirk – a modernization of a specific sort of period piece that aims to rescue it from ironic viewing. Similarly, velvet-voiced Hiddleston is excellent as her charming suitor who’s hiding a few dark secrets of his own, while an uncomfortable-looking Chastain settles for channelling Eva Green as Lucille, a tactic that backfires because you quickly realise how much better Eva Green would have been in the role. Ryan says that many of her students are familiar with the trappings of the genre even if they don’t think they know it well, just because the conventions have been featured so often in pop culture.
It soon becomes apparent the only thing this movie really has going for it is Hiddleston and Chastain’s terrific and enigmatic performances, which would have truly elevated Crimson Peak had I cared about Edith, or about anything else going on here. Sharpe shows a warm exterior to Edith, but he’s actually worse than a scoundrel. He wrote this dandy with the assistance of Matthew Robbins. Crimson Peak is hands-down one of the most darkly gorgeous and fantastical movies we’ve since the director’s Pan’s Labyrinth.
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But the wraiths, which ooze smoky ectoplasm, have the ghastly beauty of classic Japanese ghost paintings, and I could not take my eyes off of Wasikowska in her diaphanous nightgown with her blond hair hanging down her shoulders, knife in hand. The second half, however, embraces its weirdness and runs wild with it. Sure, the scares fail to shock after one gets comfortably settled in the Allerdale Hall vibe, but it is an interesting exploration of the psyche of its inhabitants. But it’s purely the visuals that draw viewers in the most. When we first see Lucille, she’s wearing a sanguin-hued gown.
