Crimson
Peak
Director:
Guillermo del Toro
Writers:
Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins
Starring:
Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam
Rating:
Four stars out of five
Available
in theaters now
When
Mia Wasikowska's Edith Cushing says at the very beginning of Crimson
Peak that
ghosts are real and she is familiar with them, she's not kidding. And
neither is director Guillermo del Toro. Ghosts are as much part of
the movie as the ornately decorated walls and busted ceiling, the
seeping floors and peeling paint, the puffy sleeves and the trailing
skirts of this English manor at the turn of the 20th
century.
These
ghosts are a matter of fact within the context of Crimson
Peak.
There is no fussing about their existence and relationship with
Edith, a young American writer who falls in love with a traveling
English baronet (Tom Hiddleston) in search of capital for his
family's clay mining and brick making (hence the blood-red goo that
give the film its title) business. Del Toro has no time to play the
“are they real or a figment of her imagination” game. He gets
right into it and doesn't look back, although one slight thing he may
have done differently is to more fully render the ghosts visually –
some are fairly bland blobs while the later ones have that staticky
and echoey silent film superimposition to them that really pops. But
generally, there is a form of control del Toro exerts in so many
aspects of the movie, from the classical iris shots opening and
closing on the things he really wants the audience to focus on to the
slow and confident dolly push-ins on the doors and hallways of the
estate at the center of the story.
Of
course, as Edith explains about the ghost story she herself is trying
to sell at the film's start, the specters in Crimson
Peak serve
as metaphors, in this case specifically, “for the past.” It is
another bold, clear indication from del Toro to the audience of the
story's intent, and it is also an acknowledgment that this story will
be smaller than one might expect heading into it.
That
is because everything about this film is related to the three people
at its center, Edith and the Sharpes, her new husband Thomas and
sister-in-law Lucille. It starts and ends with them. Thomas and
Lucille truly are 30-somethings and not ageless head hunters for the
underworld. The ghosts are not part of an ancient sacrifice ritual or
out for some sort of mayhem or revenge. And they are relatively fresh
-- they lived within Edith's, Thomas's, and Lucille's lifetimes and
each ghost is intimately familiar with one or more of the three. The
dead serve as reminders of these characters' past, much of it recent.
They are the guilt that comes from doing things a person should not
do, warnings about the types of people to avoid, and cruel visual
memories of misery in childhood, depending on which character is
involved.
They
are also manifestations of conscience, that nagging feeling Edith
gets about how something is not right with her new family. She lets
herself get swept up in the attentions of her handsome striver of a
husband, perhaps allowing the lust of a new relationship take her
places her otherwise headstrong ways would not usually allow. The
ghosts that appear to her, to warn her about the poor decisions she
is making, are frightening because facing harsh truths is
frightening. We want to bury our heads in the sand and avoid the
coldness of imperfection. Much to her personal wellbeing, Edith does
just that to keep her fantasy marriage going.
And
so Edith sacrifices what makes such a strong character early in the
film, her drive to succeed and her writerly aspirations. She is, at
the start, a wannabe Mary Shelley, but there is a lot more Jo March
in her than anything. The Little Women protagonist is
strong-willed and unable to do anything that is not her way. It is
when Edith does give away pieces of herself for this dashing,
charming Englishman that she begins to lose what makes her special,
what makes her herself. It would be like if Jo had accepted the
worst-case-scenario Laurie's marriage proposal – a refusal to
believe in herself would only result in ugliness, unhappiness, and in
Crimson Peak's case, death.
None
of this is a fault of the film, as Edith's arc is about realizing her
break from herself and taking back control of her own life. One key
scene between Edith and Lucille involving an excruciating sound
effect of a spoon scraping against a bowl of soup represents a
straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back moment in immersive detail.
And
yet, in placing so much of the dramatic heft on the shoulder of an
easily likable heroine, del Toro might shortchange the richest
relationship of the film, the one between Thomas and Lucille. Del
Toro draws such sharp contrasts between the eager-to-please Thomas
and his salty, dismissive, and protective older sister that it's a
bit of a shame he didn't make a longer movie to dive into them.
Instead, their upbringing – horrifying solitariness that led to a
fiercely loyal pairing, based on Lucille's telling – gets doled out
in small samples. They are hints meant to engage the wheel-spinning
parts of every viewer's brain because the unknown is always more
frightening than the known. However, the things del Toro makes known
about the Sharpes are so juicy, and the ways Hiddleston and Chastain
bounce off each other are so full of energy that it might be worth
the gamble of losing some of the mysterious scare factor in order to
fully explore the knotted disaster that is their trauma-borne
codependency.
But
wishing for more time in a world with fascinating characters is not
the strongest of criticisms. It is more likely a compliment to a film
crafted by a masterful director.
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