CRIMSON PEAK
Elaborate set is almost a character
If Guillermo del Toro had been in charge of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, my childhood themepark experiences would have been a very different affair. I imagine his creatures would have broken free of the attraction and gone rampaging through the Hall of Presidents to test whether Abraham Lincoln was indeed a vampire hunter.
The mansion in Crimson Peak is a terrifically frightening piece of architecture, decorated in early dungeon, except for the basement, which has been done in late Edwardian dungeon. There are corridors ringed with what appear to be teeth. A portrait of an evil-looking matriarch hangs in the hall. This is the kind of place where, if there isn’t one madwoman locked in the attic, it’s only because there are two.
Floorboards, wallboards and even the taps ooze blood-red mud. A gaping hole above the entranceway admits snow and rains leaves, in spite of the fact that there’s nary a tree in the barren landscape. Allerdale Hall is a home that needs to be swept. And raked. Also exorcised.
Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska, reprising her horror-waif role from 2013’s Stoker), gets to know Northern England’s best-kept secret through the good graces of its owner, Thomas Sharpe. He shows up in her hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., seeking venture capital for his new mining technique, invented to claw up the rich, red clay that lies beneath his ancestral home.
Sharpe cuts a Darcy-esque figure, complete with top hat and snooty sister (Jessica Chastain). No surprise that he sweeps Edith — whom someone has already compared to Jane Austen — off her feet. Edith’s father dies suddenly. The locals suspect a shaving mishap, an hypothesis that would only make sense if he was trying to remove his whiskers with a chainsaw. With nothing to keep her in Buffalo aside from a torch-carrying ophthalmologist (Charlie Hunnam), Edith accepts a proposal from Thomas, and heads to England.
Thomas is played by Tom Hiddleston, the guy you hire if you can’t get Benedict Cumberbatch. (That was literally the case for this film.) He seems a decent sort, but there’s an undercurrent of malice and deception in his attentions toward her.
Besides, his house is clearly trying to tell her something. Wraiths usually just want you out of their afterlives, but the Allerdale apparitions actually seem concerned for Edith’s safety. And let’s not forget the ghost of her mother, an insistent spectre that twice warned her to stay away from “Crimson Peak,” wherever that is.
The frights are an interesting mix. There are jump-scares, to be sure, but the overall mood is one of slowly mounting dread. Del Toro would rather creep you out of your skin than scare you out of it. As such, he uses old-school musical cues, including the childsinging-creepily (over the opening studio logo), and the eighth octave C (that far-right white key on your piano), to great effect.
The results are not quite on par with the director’s last fright-fest, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), though it could replicate that film’s Oscar wins for art direction and makeup. With its Victorian trappings, Crimson Peak will have a more familiar feel to North American audiences, and familiarity is anathema to horror. Fortunately, there’s more than enough horror to start with.