Crimson Peak

I’m at odds with this film. Absolutely everything about it is awesome from the cinematography to the production design to the tone to the special effects, everything except what actually matters when you’re making a movie: the story.

The plot is fairly straightforward, our main protagonist Edith (Mia Wasikowska) sees ghosts. One night when she is young, the ghost of her mother warns her about a place called Crimson Peak. Years later, a much older Edith meets Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and almost immediately falls head over heels for him. After some back and forth and a truly gruesome kill to kick things into gear, Edith absconds with Thomas to — you guessed it — Crimson Peak to live with him and his creepy sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). It’s not long before the reasons as to why her mother warned her about this place start to become clear as Edith does her best to figure out what’s going on in her new home.

First things first, Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is NOT a horror film. According to del Toro himself this film is more of a Gothic Romance type of deal, a fact that the advertisements and trailers do a terrible job of conveying. If you’re looking for a straightforward “The Haunting” type of haunted house horror film that Crimson Peak initially seems to come across as, you’re going to be sadly mistaken.

There’s a difference between a ghost story and a story with ghosts in them. At least that’s what our main character tells us within the first few minutes of the film and it’s a shame because a ghost story would have served this film a lot better than what’s presented here. As I said before, this is not a horror film and while there are a bunch of extremely tense and effectively scary scenes that would try and prove otherwise, that’s not what this film is about.

That’s all fine and dandy but the problem that stems from this is the fact that what the movie is actually about isn’t nearly as engaging or fun to watch as one would expect. The main romance between Edith and Thomas is extremely bland and never reaches the point where I cared about them let alone what would happen to either character. I was so preoccupied with the idea that both Thomas and his sister were just using Edith for their own ends (which isn’t far from the truth) that I was never fooled into thinking otherwise. It’s obvious something is up with these two siblings and I felt sort of insulted that the script tried to fool me for so long when it was pretty apparent that what I wanted to see, and what would eventually happen, took forever and meant so little in the grand scheme of things.

This is where the script stumbles and falls. There’s no surprise or weight behind anything that happens in the story. Del Toro tries to make you care about these characters, he tries to make you worry, but when you realize that this is not a ghost story, just a story with ghosts in them, everything kind of loses it’s edge. And again, this would have been fine by me if there were actually some kind of substance to the relationships and mystery of the film but there really isn’t. Everything in this regard has a bit of a lazy and been there done that feel that makes me think that if del Toro was always intending to make this type of Gothic Romance film that he should have just stuck to it and made a better show of the romance side of things.

Now I’m not saying everything in the story sucks because in truth there are a lot of good scenes and fun things that happen in the film, it’s just that the driving force of the movie doesn’t feel right. Let me explain: everything that stands apart from the film really only stands on its own, not pertaining too directly to the story. I kept feeling that a lot of the best stuff in the film could have still been in it even with a totally different story in place. It’s like del Toro had a bunch of cool ideas he wanted to throw in here but didn’t know how to connect them properly to fit the overarching story he was trying to tell and to me, that lowers the value of this movie while everything else stands tall. This problem is very similar to the issues I had with del Toro’s Pacific Rim. Sure the idea is cool and there’s freaking monsters fighting mechs but the film ended up just like this one: a cool idea that falls flat when the story and characters need to actually do something.

As for the acting, everyone does an ok job with their material. Hiddleston as usual does some really solid work towards the middle of the film and Chastain has some creepy scenes throughout but Wasikowska and the almost pointless character Charlie Hunnam plays didn’t impress me as much.

Other than that, the horror bits go over extremely well, as does the entire look of the film. Along with some wildly unnerving ghost designs that meld CGI and practical effects to gruesome effect, the castle/mansion that the movie is set in is, simply put, a phenomenal achievement in production design: it truly is a sight to behold. Furthermore, the entire idea behind why Crimson Peak is named as such is a pretty cool idea that further shows how creepy this movie can get when it’s firing on all cylinders.

There’s no doubt that del Toro is one of the best visual directors in the biz but Crimson Peak is more style over substance with a lot of the strongest parts of the movie few and far between.