Blood covers the hands and face of Edith (Mia Wasikowska), posed in shocked horror against the snow and recalling a warning given her years earlier by her dead mother: “Beware the crimson peak.” With Crimson Peak, writer-director Guillermo del Toro embraces one of humanity’s oldest stories, the ghost story, in lavishly over-the-top gothic style.
Like a character by an American counterpart to Charlotte Bronte, Edith is a sharp-witted girl drawn into the darkest night of the human condition. She encounters a melancholy young Englishman, Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), whose sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), favors crimson gowns and wears a ruby ring. Del Toro is capable of fabulous cinematography and is keenly aware of color. The shades in Crimson Peak are mostly dark, save for Edith’s white gown and the billowing blizzard near the end. Lurid hues are framed in inky darkness throughout.
Crimson Peak is a 19th-century period piece starting in Edith’s hometown, Buffalo, N.Y., and climaxing on the bleak wasteland of Cumberland, England. Edith’s father, a proud American tycoon, is distrustful of the Sharpes and endeavors to break the growing love between Sir Thomas and his daughter, but meets a grisly end in the men’s room of his private club. Although Edith is fond of Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), she is a budding writer swept away by the Bronte vision of the Sharpes. “Where I come from, ghosts are not to be taken lightly,” Thomas says encouragingly, after glancing at Edith’s yarn. The ghost in the tale is only a metaphor of the past, she insists.
In Crimson Peak, as in gothic literature, the present is haunted by the past. Thomas and Lucille have a past—a most disturbing one whose heavy gravitation pulls Edith into their orbit. Like many gothic heroines, Edith is in love with a damaged man, a mad aristocrat brooding over his own history; her marriage to him will be a trap.
Without transcending the clichés, del Toro makes full use of them—occasionally to chilling effect. The Victorian manor Edith shares with her father is dark and spooky enough; the Sharpes’ ancestral hall scarier still—a crumbling gothic pile approached by a crimson clay road suggesting a trail of blood. Whether in Buffalo or Cumberland, the cold wind groans, the houses reply in minor keys, the kerosene lamps cast a fitful glow, and some of the computer-generated effects are impressive—especially Edith’s mother, whose specter is the color and consistency of crumbling carbon.
A great ghost film? Not when compared to such disquieting masterpieces as The Haunting (1963). The screenplay includes historical incongruities and, worse, emotional ones; the tone of unease isn’t consistent. Fear doesn’t mount gradually but comes in spurts and sometimes the CGI ghosts look just like CGI ghosts. And yet, for all that, Crimson Peak leaves vivid impressions of a gothic world furnished with continual reminders that death is the shadow cast by life.
