I don’t care that Allerdale Hall rests atop a cavern of bright red clay which seeps into the floorboards and sometimes drips down the walls. I don’t mind the never-explained exploded ceiling that shoots sunlight and moonlight and dead leaves and snowflakes straight down into the foyer. I can even live with the shambling ghosts of its murdered former denizens. I just want to own the damned house from Crimson Peak, and I want to own it now.
Guillermo del Toro does this sort of thing a lot. He paints pictures of monstrosities with such lavish attention to detail that they cease to be horrifying and start to become alluring. In films like Hellboy these monsters become our friends. In films like Pan’s Labyrinth they become our mirror image. But in films like Crimson Peak they become our Ikea catalogue. The characters and story in Crimson Peak are but a flimsy delivery mechanism for fabulous production design and luxurious costumes, and horrors which have a nostalgic bloom. Crimson Peak is inviting, even after the oily specters warn us to run for our lives.
The story is second-rate Bronté, but bless everyone for trying anyhow. A bespectacled wallflower named Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) absolutely will NOT fall in love with the stuck up Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). Certainly she won’t. There’s just no way. But forty-five minutes later there she is, moving in with him anyway, newly married but miraculously still virginal, while his creepy sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) prowls the halls and makes uncomfortable comments.
Something is going on here, obviously, and it won’t take long for the audience to figure it out. The mysteries of Crimson Peak couldn’t fill a pamphlet, so del Toro fills his film with slow trudges through candlelit hallways, and long shots of spectacular set dressing. So Crimson Peak is a disappointing horror thriller, but only because it’s not a horror thriller. It’s a melodramatic costume drama, and the kind that ends in madness and tragedy. The pure gothic atmosphere is the point, not the marketing gimmick. You are supposed to lose yourself, not tut-tut from the balcony seats.
And if you can fall headlong into the ethereal dreaminess of Allerdale Hall, and if you can wish yourself vividly into the silky outfits, and if you can allow yourself the doe-eyed fantasy of true love with a creamy British accent… where was I?
Oh yes. If you can slip into the kinky folds of Guillermo del Toro’s latest love letter to weirdness, you will find yourself welcomed and content. Just probably not intellectually stimulated, or scared. It’s not that kind of film.
Photos: Universal Pictures
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
