Lavish sets 'Peak' of disappointing gothic romance
Horror director Guillermo del Toro is so busy putting on Jane Eyres in his lavishly overproduced gothic romance "Crimson Peak" that he forgets two critical components: spine-tingling suspense and serious characters who don't induce laughter with what they say and how they look.
Del Toro directed two truly creepy projects, "The Devil's Backbone" and "Cronos," plus produced one of the scariest and smartest ghost tales of all time, "The Orphanage."
With "Crimson Peak," the filmmaker has fallen back on the visually bloated, character-crippled approach he took to his science-fiction action film "Pacific Rim."
"Ghosts are real," Edith (Mia Wasikowska) says to us during the opening shot of "Crimson Peak." "This much I know!"
Dressed in dirty white, she stands in snow, her hands bloodied, her right cheek lacerated by some sort of blade.
This much we know: Edith can't die. She's narrating this story. No suspense here.
Flashback time!
As a little girl, Edith sees the ghost of her mother hobbling down a long hallway, casting "Nosferatu"-like extended finger shadows on the wall.
"Beware of Crimson Peak!" she wheezes before departing like Marley's ghost.
Years pass. Edith turns into an attractive wannabe-writer of ghost fiction, but publishers only want romance books from female writers, prompting her to consider a pen name. (Charlotte Bronte wrote "Jane Eyre" as "Currer Bell," but here, Edith is compared to both Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.)
Trouble starts when Edith meets British baronet Thomas Sharpe - not a singer as the title might imply, but a British entrepreneur seeking funds from Edith's businessman dad (Jim Beaver), who suspects Sharpe might be a con man.
Thomas is played by Tom Hiddleston, comically resembling Peter Cushing from some long-lost Hammer film. He's the opposite of the dashing American doctor Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam). who not so secretly pines for Edith.
After dad's head gets bashed in on a men's room sink, Edith marries Tom and is whisked off to his old English castle along with his dark and mysterious sister Lucille (a miscast Jessica Chastain), who shoots eye arrows at Edith any time she comes close to her brother.
The castle is a blustery, deteriorating structure with a huge hole in the roof, something like Manderley from "Rebecca" before the Property Brothers got around to rehabbing it for market.
Only later does Edith realize that Thomas' castle is called Crimson Peak because its bright-red, chemical-rich soil melts through the snow in winter, creating an illusion of being surrounded by blood.
The ornate and detailed production design of "Crimson Peak" almost suffocates the rest of this movie, a disappointing mishmash of gruesome Dario Argento-esque violence with garish bloody spirits resembling targets in a first-person shooter game.
The romance feels as clinical as the computer-generated ghosts who have no actual function in this plot beyond warning Edith and then looking really icky when they try to talk to her without cheeks.
Wasikowska creates a wonderful heroine with her porcelain features and lily white complexion. But Hiddleston and Chastain are so overtly villainous that their reactions elicit unintended laughs. (So does the imposing portrait of their dead mother, resembling a comically evil witch from a "Harry Potter" movie.)
The screenplay, by del Toro and Matthew Robbins, doesn't bother to play by its own rules. If Edith relates this story, she can't know what her husband and sister-in-law say to each other in private, even if the writers need to tell viewers somebody did put poison in the porridge.
So, beware of "Crimson Peak." The trailers are actually scarier than the film.
“Crimson Peak”
★ ★
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Charlie Hunnam
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated R for language, sexual situations, violence. 119 minutes