Susan Granger’s review of “Crimson Peak” (Universal Pictures)
Studded with subversive symbolism, Guillermo del Toro’s deceitful, psychosexual thriller may be just the ticket for Halloween weekend, although it’s neither surprising nor particularly scary.
“Ghosts are real,” we’re told in the beginning, as aspiring American novelist Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) explains a short story she’s written.
“It’s not a ghost story,” she tells a prospective publisher. “More a story with ghosts in it. Ghosts are a metaphor for the past.”
In the early 1900s in Buffalo, New York, Edith is the only child of a wealthy, widowed industrialist, Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver). Eminently eligible, she’s courted by optometrist Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnan).
But then she meets obsequious Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a penniless British aristocrat who is seeking American backing for his mining device called “a clay harvester.” He’s accompanied by his icy, intimidating older sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain).
After Edith’s father astutely observes, “There’s something not quite right about them,” there’s brutal murder that’s made to look like an accident.
Heiress Edith then marries seductive Thomas, who whisks her off to Allerdale Hall, his ancestral estate in Cumberland in northern England. It’s a decrepit, four-story Victorian house with a creaking elevator – and she’s forbidden to descend to the basement beneath the main floor.
It soon becomes obvious that Thomas is not be who he seems, particularly when Edith, clutching a candelabra, sees terrifying apparitions haunting the cold, cavernous hallways of the lavishly ornate mansion, perched atop a heap of blood-red clay.
Reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” innocent Edith’s pale, porcelain-like fragility is in stark contrast with calculating Lucille’s menacing, malevolent intensity.
While director Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy II,” “Pacific Rim”) insists that this is a Gothic romance, not a horror film, the screenplay he co-wrote with Matthew Robbins positions the heroine to eventually discover what the audience has already discerned – making it not only a traditional but predictable melodrama.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Crimson Peak” is a sinister, supernatural 6 – with stunning sets, sumptuous costumes, and stylish cinematography.
