Crimson Peak (Review)

Crimson Peak is not so much a movie as it is a narrative haunted house. It is ostentatiously designed to be experienced in three dimensions. The media on which it is shot robs it of any cinematic texture, and the story is spilled in our laps with all the grace and reserve of a spring-mounted skeleton leaping from a cupboard. The visual experience of the film is that of an aggressively lit museum display. Even in the darkest spookiest recesses of a decrepit old mansion every nook is made visible and has a surface with all the gauze and mystery of a brass railing.

The director Guillermo del Toro has experience telling ghost stories. His masterpiece The Devil’s Backbone is both chilling and melancholy. It uses ghosts to shed light on the frailties of life and emotion as well as deliver some memorable suspense and genuine scares. For the length of Crimson Peak however he seems to have wearied of both mystery and delicacy. In this film he very much favors the immediate delivery of visual shocks, unaided by suspense or emotion. The first five minutes of the film so thoroughly empty his bag of tricks that suspense or unease are virtually removed as possible effects for the rest of the film. All that is left is to wander around the rest of the film judging the “scares” on aesthetics and construction.

When it comes to aesthetics and construction the later two thirds of Crimson Peak are effective. In the history of haunted houses this film’s multistory gothic edifice, missing its roof and seemingly built entirely of haunted portraits and crenulated cinders, which stands atop the Crimson Peak of the title, is quite memorable. The seeds of an effective and profoundly frightening film are here.

Within the film, Crimson Peak is a hill of red clay in the grimmest corner of British imagination, a place so fog bound and remote it makes the collective imaginings of the Bronte sisters look like a Walt Disney theme park. Yet the clarity with which the high-resolution digital photography and 3D obsessed design render it makes it all seem spacious and awe inspiring instead of lowering and scary. I’d be afraid of freezing to death in the house on Crimson Peak but not necessarily of any of its contents. There is just too much space in which to move around and make an effective getaway.

If we as viewers had been brought into the house with any sense of mystery as to the film’s attitude toward ghosts, or the nature of the owners as either beneficent or evil, the secondary revelations that crop up might have had more of an impact. But with these major points of the game given away before even a third of the movie has passed, the revelation of more minor plot elements, though enlightening as to why things happen the way they do in the film, add nothing to any sense of unease on the part of the audience beyond simple queasiness.

As an environment to move about in and point at items of interest, Crimson Peak is successful. As an example of cinematic storytelling it is hardly distinct from a creaky, over-elaborate, and poorly built house.