THAT’S THE SPIRIT

A classic Gothic ghost story to send chills down your spine . . . with a stately home that’s far deadlier than Downton

Crimson Peak (15) Verdict: Genuinely eerie, and scary

The Lobster (15)

Verdict: Quirky, but overlong

THE SURNAME ‘Cushing’ resonated with fans of scary films long before writerdirector Guillermo del Toro gave it to his heroine, played by Mia Wasikowska, in the compellingly eerie and atmospheric Crimson Peak.

Whether del Toro and his co-writer Matthew Robbins were paying homage to the late Peter Cushing, who knows? But I fancy that the old boy might be applauding from beyond the grave; like his own best pictures, Crimson Peak delivers the kind of chills that start in the back of the neck and work down.

It’s not really a horror movie, though, more a Gothic melodrama heavy on the special, and indeed, spectral effects.

Wasikowska plays Edith Cushing, the only daughter of a steel magnate in Buffalo, upstate New York, around the turn of the 20th century. An aspiring novelist, Edith is a bright young woman, and spirited in more ways than one, for she is haunted by the alarming ghost of her own dead mother, who floats up to her from time to time advising her to beware of Crimson Peak. Neither she, nor we, are yet aware of what this might be.

Like the piece of fiction Edith has written, this film is not so much a ghost story, but ‘a story with a ghost in it’.

AT FIRST, it looks more like an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, as the Buffalo socialites fuss around an elegant yet impoverished English baronet who has arrived in town seeking financial backing for a mechanical digger he’s invented back home.

This is Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who, with his fancy accent and old-world charm, waltzes Edith off her feet first literally and then romantically. Her would-be suitor, kindly physician Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), can hardly compete.

Edith’s astute father doesn’t trust the newcomer, and bribes him to leave. But Sir Thomas has a sister in tow, the scheming Lucille (Jessica Chastain), and together they contrive to lure Edith back to England, and to their collapsing stately pile in Cumberland, Allerdale Hall, a place so gloomy and remote it makes Wuthering Heights look inviting. By now Edith has gone and wed Sir Thomas; the Earl of Grantham clearly wasn’t the only English aristocrat prepared to marry into Yankee money to prop up the ancestral estate.

But Allerdale Hall is no Downton Abbey. For one thing, it is built on red clay that seeps even into the water pipes, giving it the nickname … Crimson Peak.

For another, the house holds some ghastly, ghostly secrets, which plucky Edith, gradually realising the extent of her predicament, resolves to find out.

The film is sumptuously shot, lit, scored and acted. Chastain and Hiddleston will probably get most of the plaudits, and they’re both very good, but for me Wasikowska is the stand- out performer. She is certainly well cast, with the pallor of a victim but the eyes of a survivor.

The bulk of the credit, though, belongs to del Toro, the Mexican director who showed his mastery of glowering fantasy with The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Crimson Peak further enhances his portfolio. I liked lots of things about it, but perhaps most of all i ts air of playfulness.

While it takes itself as seriously as any Gothic melodrama should, at the screening I went to, a comically severe portrait of Sir Thomas’s mother got the laugh it was doubtless intended to provoke. Yet moments later, the young woman next to me had slid almost off her seat in fright.

THE Lobster is similarly playful and provocative, if not quite as successful. But what it does do is pull off the considerable trick of placing the near-future in a world strongly evocative of the past.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s first English-language feature is largely set in an old-fashioned seaside hotel so powerfully reminiscent of the big, dank places my parents used to take me to, circa 1970, that I could practically inhale the mustiness rising from the antimacassars.

Heaven knows how a Greek director (who also co-wrote,