Crimson Peak Guillermo del Toro

Crimson Peak Guillermo del Toro

I spend a lot of my time in the Victorian age. It is where the monsters come from. Kind of. Al, so my mother was a massive fan of Costume Dram, and in the lockdown and a couple of years preceding it, we binged the likes of Downtown and Austen adaptations with a relish. Some hit with social commentary, others like us feeling it was more blubbering heights. But Crimson Peak bridges current sensibilities while keeping the senses taut with gothic horror to engage throughout.

It is comfortable from the outset in its conventions. Modernist daughters question the patriarchy, tragic childhoods and the need to build one’s place of standing in polite society. But the eye is there from the start. We are here to gorge on the detail and the beauty. The film reminds me of the definition I learnt of grotesque while reading Necroscope by bringing Lumley “for something to be so unnatural it can not help but captivate with a sense of compulsions and attraction,” a style that Del Toro brings to all his monsters in every realm/

While the society is repressed, the story certainly isn’t. And it’s built to shock in the right places, not just in the ghosts and imagery but also in broken taboos and relationships, like the house sinking in a red mire of degradation.

Tom Hiddleston’s Thomas Sharpe, for example, at first, all in black and with secrets of his own, could be another darcy bad boy fantasy that continues to live in biker jackets today. But Hiddleston can evolve the stereotype and give him more range while diluting the menace or threat hidden behind his soft hands.

The fundamental role is shown in Mia Wasikowska’s edit once the film moves to the house that drips clay. She moves from ingenue to bereaved and vulnerable to a final girl that one can support without the need for a man to save her.

If there is any failing, it is not so much in the female characters but rather the singular proportion they spend whaling and scheming. Hysteria could have been toned down, and more attention should have been given to their intellectual strengths rather than emotional ones. But given its cut from the tapestry of the genre, it’s hard to disagree with.

The film is quite brutal in its violence and death while relatively chaste in its sex until the final act, which frankly was so shocking I immediately checked the rating as soon as I got home. 15.

As a film from 2015, it may seem strange to see it in the cinema. It’s the perfect choice for a winter horror haunted season. But the big screen delights in the spectacle and gothic nature of it.

The plot levels would also put Arthur Conan Doyle to shame, and as a mystery alone, it would hold up against many of the more absurd mysteries from Baker St.

So I recommend you visit Allerdale Hall and let the film sweep over you. It’s a charming, passionate work and leaves little to the mind except one’s uncertainties. The twists shack and fill the world with an ambiguous sense of villainy that makes you wonder who the victim within the family is.