Dream house
Del Toro stages a loving homecoming…
Crimson Peak
15
Out 15 February DVD, BD, VOD
Mia Wasikowska’s Edith Cushing reaches a hand out to the screen, either in temptation or yearning. Later, a banker feels a man’s hands to test his worthiness for a loan; Edith takes Tom Sharpe’s (Tom Hiddleston) hand in a waltz; Sharpe is goaded to get his hands dirty by a woman who gets her own mucky mitts down his pants; and, finally, the mystery of Edith’s out-stretched hand is resolved.
Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous gothic romance isn’t a scary experience, but the attention lavished on charged motifs typifies his loving attention to loaded detail. Crimson Peak didn’t quite score with audiences or critics, who perhaps expected more gotchas or overt shocks. Revisited, its real identity is revealed: an exquisitely executed exercise in multi-layered symbol-heavy melodrama.
For del Toro, it’s an act of reconnection with the spirit of his Spanish-language films, a sensibility distinct from both horror trends and his last American foray, ’bot-rocking monsterbasher Pacific Rim. The charred ghost whose life force pours from her echoes The Devil’s Backbone’s leaky ghost kid. And as New York writer Edith marries Tom and moves to his extravagantly mouldering British pile, we recall Pan’s Labyrinth’s heroine’s rites of passage among monsters.
As Edith chafes with Tom’s possessive sister Lucille ( Jessica Chastain), del Toro electrifies the mood with his and production designer Thomas E. Sanders’ own passion for the haunted house. Crimson Peak starts sumptuously: a shaving sequence steams with style. Then it moves to the Sharpes’ beautifully rank Allerdale Hall and gets really plush, every art-spooked corridor a dare, every staircase a seduction. Don’t even mention the basement. As thresholds, keys and cellars seethe with suggestion, cinema’s great haunts gain a new companion: Hill House, the Overlook, Allerdale Hall.
A cast could get lost in a place like this, but del Toro’s leads match his ardour. Merely seated, Hiddleston conveys the curdled vanity of a man awaiting his portrait. Wasikowska splices Alice’s innocence with Stoker’s hidden steel. Squeezing rivers of fetid malice from the word “Mother” alone, Chastain even manages not to be upstaged by the maroon dress that gushes from Lucille like pooling blood.
And bleed these characters do. Unlike more ethereal ghost stories, Crimson Peak gives its ghosts tangibility and ensures the wounds of the living hurt, like Vidal’s Joker-esque mouth injury in Pan’s. If this sounds like del Toro is looking backwards, the payoff is a re-assertion of his original voice and a ghost story like few others: one that gives the living, the dead and cinematic style their full-blooded due. Copious Blu featurettes explore Allerdale’s every nook (Hiddleston conducts a tour of hidden places); there’s also candid footage of del Toro directing, plus the man and his cast interviewing each other. Just don’t watch until you’ve seen the main feature… Extras › Deleted Scenes › Featurettes (BD)