Hell’s bells and buckets and buckets of blood are the motif of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, a histrionic gothic extravaganza starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain. The Mexican director’s grandiose ambitions to update the haunted house story result in a lurid mess, entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
“Ghosts do exist. This much I know,” says Wasikowska’s character Edith Cushing at the start of the film, and pretty much straightway the ghost of her mother — a black-skulled, claw-handed Harry Potter dementor derivative — crashes into her bedroom to moan: “Beware of Crimson Peak!” (Has mother seen a preview of this movie? Is she trying to save you from wasting £11 at the multiplex?)
The year is 1901. Carriages await. Machines are newfangled. Sleeves are puffy. In Buffalo, New York, Edith is an aspiring American writer and heiress who is swept off her feet and shaken down for her fortune by the dashing Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston in a moth-munched velvet coat), a baronet who arrives from England intent on securing finance for his steam-powered clay-mining machine. Edith’s other suitor, Dr Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), is left cooling his heels and gnashing his perfect white teeth.
Edith’s father dies, mysteriously attacked by a sink in his gentleman’s club, and this is the beginning of a tsunami of gore that gushes through the rest of the movie. Edith heads with Thomas to his ancestral pad on the Cumberland moors, Allerdale Hall. It turns out to be nicknamed Crimson Peak, thanks to blood-red clay that oozes from the ground, and has metaphor written all over it.
While this sight, the complete lack of central heating, and strange-tasting tea on bone china might serve as a warning for normal mortals, Edith settles into the rotting pile with strange alacrity, given the vast numbers of red, skeletal, screaming ghosts, some with cleavers in their hair, that seem to be everywhere, moaning. There’s also a haunted red rubber ball, pursued by Edith’s dog. It makes you want to shout “It’s behind you!”, panto-style.
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Being a gullible American, Edith was probably hoping for Downton Abbey, but she gets a family curse instead. She also gets a mad-eyed sister-in-law, Lucille, played by a miscast Chastain, a chatelaine dangling the house keys, but with none of the icy disdain of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca. Despite Del Toro’s talk about “the power that love has to make monsters of us all”, Lucille’s passion seems oddly subdued — perhaps it’s the cold. Get her a Slanket in front of a roaring fire, and she would probably come to life. The usually powerful Hiddleston seems to pale against the crimson background; the cartoonish setting requires a dastardly villain, but none is apparent.
While the plot is barely a step above an episode of Scooby-Doo, we should have a moment’s respectful silence for the wonderfully macabre production design by Thomas E Sanders, based on sketches from the wild and wonderful imagination of Del Toro. The director insisted that much of the £33 million budget was spent on recreating the rickety mansion in full, down to an ornate wrought-iron lift that descends from the parlour into a basement with wet crimson walls that resemble the inside of a corpse. By the end of the movie you’ve seen so many shades of red, you could make your own Farrow & Ball paint chart.
Certainly Del Toro can handle spectacle and fantasy — see his previous films Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth — but he is wedded here to all the haunted house clichés: creaks, cracks, cellars, even execrable plumbing, which seems to cause the taps to run with blood.
The centrepiece of the story is supposed to be the triangle between Lucille, Thomas and Edith, which is less than electric. When Del Toro tries to direct passionate, gothic romance, it’s about as sexy as a wet weekend in a bad B&B. Hiddleston never reaches those Heathcliffean Wuthering Heights, and Wasikowska’s spongy yellow hair looks more like a showstopper from The Great British Bake Off. The bedroom scene is all soggy bottom. Plus the mustard velvet outfits, combined with the ketchup blood, had me looking out for a hot-dog stand in the dark shadows.
So in many ways Crimson Peak is incredibly amusing, but that has gone right over Del Toro’s head. He has always said he doesn’t do irony, but I couldn’t help but find this movie more hilarious than horrifying. If only Del Toro had used some restraint, and the cast had been given a script that merited their talents. A ghost story without scares is just plain silly.
Guillermo del Toro, 15, 119min