Skeletons in the Gothic Closet
Crimson Peak / directed by Guillermo del Toro
Here’s the thing: though Crimson Peak is commitedly, hauntedly gothic, populated with snarling ghosts that seem to want to reach out and touch ya, it’s the living that heroine Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) really needs to watch out for. In the film's opening scenes, writerly, wallflowery Edith is swept off her feet by dashing English nobleman Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) in a meeting that seems to be pure turn-of-the-20th-century serendipity: Thomas is visiting America in pursuit of funding for a machine he’s invented to mine clay from his family estate back home, and Edith is the daughter of the Buffalo, NY investor Thomas hopes will back him. Thomas has even built a toy-sized scale model of the thing to puff away and impress the investors. But Edith's father Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver) is a stern judge of character, and doesn’t trust something about the panty-waist Brit; he sends him and his creepy sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), packing after a little background check turns up some bad news on the pair. One violent, mysterious paternal death and a transatlantic crossing later, though, Thomas is carrying his bride Edith across the threshold of his family manor, Allerdale Hall.
Whatever demonic vibes might or might not emanate from the place, it’s unquestionably a house-keeping hell. A textbook example of fallen grandeur, the middle of the once-proud roof is rotted away, so that autumn leaves tumble gracefully down through the central foyer. The baron explains that the mansion is also sinking, a trod-upon floor plank splurting out viscous pink ooze to make his point that the edifice is built on unstable clay. Plus, it’s just goshdarned big, with all sorts of doors and passages through which Edith is enjoined not to go. Between cryptic but clearly sinister-intentioned exchanges between the siblings and Lucille’s strangely emphatic efforts to pour a strangely bitter tea down Edith’s gullet, the innocent Edith is clearly in the clutches of a sordid plot that seems to have everything to do with parting her from her inheritance as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. Meanwhile, Thomas' completed invention puffs and cranks away, scooping semi-valuable muck from the earth’s resistant bowels - but at what cost? - at what cost?!?!
And then there are Edith’s ghostly visions, the haunted icing on this gothic triple layer cake. Except I shouldn’t call them visions, because they’re real enough to her. Willowy and corpse-like, a tricky combination of evanescence and menace, they present themselves with various degrees of flair and kinetic energy: one appears with peekaboo rapidity; another seems only capable of dragging itself ominously after her; a third lies hatchet-skulled in a bathtub, soaking in ectoplasmic epsom salts. Has Edith been brought to the house as some sort of human sacrifice, or do the ghosts have other business with her? Whatever the case may be, an almost Victorian primness seems to restrain the fright factor: their appearances are arguably more playful than unsettling. The ghosts are a contributor to, and a microcosm of, Crimson Peak’s general conundrum and flaw: a great machine of menace has been built up, but it ends up running at a lower output than all the foreshadowing has led us to expect. The wintry grounds of the estate may redden to resemble a blood slurry snowcone, but it’s clay, not actual blood, that’s behind the effect; the walls may hide gruesome secrets, but we’re not exactly talking a gates-of-hell level situation here. The evil forces at play are all too human: the final showdown comes not in the form of ghosts vomiting hellfire, but a couple of Victorian chicks duking out in a knife fight (well, a knife v. hatchet fight, but same dif.) The whole movie feels like an unending slow burn: the promised payoff never arrives.