Crimson Peak, with its crumbling mansion, blood-red soaked snow, constrictive satin gowns and troubled tuxedoed heroes, has enough DNA to clone a dozen ghost stories. GDT and his co-conspirator, screenwriter Matthew Robins, have opted for only about three but they've spread their influence net wide, name-checking both Mary Shelley and Jane Austen in first ten minutes. In actuality, they could have just split the difference and run with one of the Brontës.
They're tilting at the meta-literary here, you see. Their heroine, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring author, is writing a ghost story (well a story with ghosts but the ghosts aren't really ghosts they're metaphors...) into which, at the request of her publisher, she's shoehorning a trifling romance. By way of on-screen reflection, the trifling romantic lead comes in the form of Mr. Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an impoverished English baronet with nothing but a dilapidated "metaphor"-infested estate to his name. To make sure and certain that proceedings hit peak-gothic, Mr Sharpe's frosty sister, Lucille (an almost-camp-enough Jessica Chastain) is ever-hovering, a little too close for comfort on multiple levels.
A lot of the effort here (possibly even too much of the effort) has gone into creating the sickly-rich gothic fantasia in which Edith, Thomas, Lucille and all the CGI "metaphors" interact. The Sharpe mansion with its indoor snow, rickety iron-barred elevators, blood red basement and vagina-dentata hallways is an environment that invites relentless visual exploration, especially as lit by GDT's bold colour clashes. The issue is that this exploration ends up being far more intriguing than the intentionally melodramatic human (and metaphorical) events happening in and about. All this leaves Crimson Peak presenting as an elaborate open world computer game. In fact, I mistakenly read it as such, probably a holdover from GDT's until-recent attachment to the 'Silent Hill' franchise.
Mistakes aside, the let's-explore-how-cool-this-shit-looks interpretation of the film is probably a more honest read than the uneasy ghost story romance pastiche that GDT and Robins have attempted, seemingly as an end in itself. There's little pushing Edith from room to room, certainly no sense of dread, foreboding or throbbing passion.
Basically, it's pretty but inert.
Crimson Peak may turn out to be the film that sees me hanging up my GDT pom-poms and resigning from the cheer squad. After years of rah-rahing, even championing little favoured (but super fist-pumpy) Pacific Rim, I have to finally admit that his artistic trajectory, though sticking with the luscious, isn't tending towards the narratively satisfying.
I'll be taking each one as it comes from hereon in.
★★
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