#90: Crimson Peak
Guillermo del Toro takes on gothic horror with all the subtlety of a Hammer
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 25, 2019.
Initial release: September 25, 2015
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro has an incredibly distinctive style. He’s all about making something that is either a renaissance painting or the cover of a cheap novel, or, in the case of Tom Hiddleston vehicle Crimson Peak, he’s doing both simultaneously. Billed as a modern take on the ghost story and gothic romance, Crimson Peak certainly is that, but the lurid use of color (especially red) evokes nothing so much as Roger Corman, only with a better set, better script, better special effects, and better cinematography.
The story centers around Edith, a young American woman and daughter to a wealthy industrialist, who has the capability to see ghosts, beginning with her own mother, and her romance with Thomas, a dark young Brit who’s come to her father for financial help with a mining project. After her father’s mysterious death, she marries Thomas and moves to his family home he shares with his sister Lucille. The house is steadily crumbling and sinking into the clay mines below, and that same red clay is seeping up into the house, giving it its name: Crimson Peak.
Make no mistake, this is not a subtle horror film. Del Toro doesn’t do subtle. There are plenty of visible ghosts, and all of them are the best CGI floating, bloody skeletal creatures that money can buy, popping up right when the film seems to need a scary moment. In the hands of a different director, the ghosts might be shoved to the side, only hinted or glimpsed at, certainly not revealed in their full gory glory. But in the hands of a different director, the film wouldn’t be nearly so gorgeous. So you get what you get with del Toro.
The set design is fantastic, especially the house itself, which seems to be as much an extension of the mines proper as a centuries-old manor house. It’s isolated and windswept, and steadily crumbling apart even as clay as red as 70s fake blood oozes from everywhere.
The romance aspect is certainly fulfilled, but as always with films like this, it’s less interesting than the gothic horror aspect, which is very much on the unsubtly macabre end of the spectrum. It’s not just the ghosts, it’s not just the bloody red everywhere, it’s the script. The finale is where the film goes off the rails (in a good way) and off in a direction you might not expect from a film like this. Nothing explodes, but it turns into a different kind of film as the plot is exposed and dark pasts are uncovered. Only del Toro could have made it work.
This is not a film that asks much of your brain, especially once Edith transforms from a smart, witty novelist to standard gothic horror heroine #552. But del Toro is a master of beautiful schlock, and this film is as visually arresting as it is emptily entertaining.
