Movie Review: 'Crimson Peak'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- "Ghosts are real. This much I know."
Thus does Crimson Peak begin in voiceover, then attempt to impress and scare us at the same time.
Question: So which is it, a gothic romance, a ghost story, or a horror thriller?
Answer: Yes.
Crimson Peak is a combo-platter melodrama set at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Mia Wasikowska plays Edith Cushing (perhaps named for horror-flick icon and Star Wars ensemble member Peter Cushing), an aspiring horror novelist struggling to succeed in a male-dominated marketplace who has a strong interest in telling supernatural tales, perhaps because of a childhood trauma when the ghost of her deceased mother visited her and warned her to beware of something called – wait for it -- Crimson Peak.
Well, she's about to try to live through one of those tales.
Although her father (Jim Beaver) would like her to settle down with ophthalmologist Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who loves her and was a childhood friend, she has fallen for and marries Sir Thomas Sharpe, a charming aristocrat played by Tom Hiddleston, in Buffalo, New York.
Sir Thomas takes his new bride to live in his family's ancestral home in Cumberland, England, a mansion on a mountaintop that he shares with his lonely, deranged sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe, played by Jessica Chastain.
To the bride's chagrin, which is bound to develop into something worse, Edith's new home is a decaying estate sitting on red clay that seems to harbor sinister secrets that the siblings are intent on keeping to themselves.
Director Guillermo del Toro (Pen's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, Hellboy, Mimic, Cronos, The Devil's Backbone), the superb craftsman and technician who co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins, treats it as the skewed romantic triangle that it is, but tries to give us something within the horror genre that we haven't seen much of of late: nostalgic gothic elegance that recalls Hitchcock's Rebecca.
That is, he takes the slow-build approach, lets the characters and relationships rather than the special effects dominate screen time, and – despite the expected generic shock cuts and ineffective ghost story scares along the way, which we can live with -- lets the sets, props, costumes and vistas work their mood magic through the first two acts.
So far so good.
But the stumbling block comes in the third act, when Del Toro's gothic romance suddenly turns turns into a stab-a-thon bloodbath. So much so that the film not only ceases to be frightening or disturbing but, frankly, verges on the self-parody laughable.
The primary players – Wasikowska, Hiddleston, and Chastain – bring their obvious skill sets to the mansion, but the characters are not as fleshed out as the house itself. And the actors virtually disappear into the haunted-house excess that is the film's climax and conclusion.
So we'll take a peek at 2 stars out of 4. The atmospheric Crimson Peak has an old-fashioned spookiness to it, but the horror and ghost story elements eventually swallow the bloody movie whole.
