Krishna
When I heard Guillermo Del Toro has actually directed a film after the fascinating Pan’s Labyrinth, I wanted to drop everything and see the movie. He has been executive producer of a lot of movies that bear his name in the posters prominently of late, but he has not directed them. (See our review of Mama, earlier, for an example.) So this was, for me, a long awaited event. See the movie I did and came out with a considerable dissatisfaction.
Some of the Guillermo effects are there. The dilapidated Crimson Peak is well set and the ghosts, especially that of the protagonist Edith Cushing’s mother are refreshingly different. They seem to trail some kind of smoke to show the ethereal quality of ghosts and this is the kind of small touches that Toro gives his movies that make them stand out.
But then the story is not like him at all. The twist is kind of easy to foresee (Remember the end of Pan’s Labyrinth? This does not even come close)
The story is one of Edith Cushing, heir to the fortune of a businessman. She is charmed and falls in love with Sir Thomas Sharpe from England, who seems to have the most charming manners she has seen. When the father seems to be against it, he dies in a brutal murder, with his head crushed against a sink, leaving Edith to proceed with the romance.
She marries Sir Thomas and moves to England. Before she leaves, the vapour trailing ghost of her own mother warns her ‘Beware of the Crimson Peak’. She finds that Sir Thomas is living in a creepy, dilapidated mansion with her sister Lady Lucille Sharp.
The mystery deepens when Lucille seems to hate her, keeps her literally imprisoned, and refuses to hand over the keys of the mansion to the new mistress. Sir Thomas is all charm and assurance.
Slowly, she uncovers the gruesome truth and the mystery. There are also some additional surprises where she realizes that the brother and sister have been having an incestuous affair and have been trying to slowly kill her for her inheritance.
The ending is bizarre and involves brutal efforts to kill each other.
The story is weak, so the strong portrayal, the sets etc do not make up for it. The movie, I think, could be justifiably done by many others equally well and does not need a Guillermo at the helm.
If you perhaps go without the preconceived notion that I had, perhaps you may have enjoyed it a bit more, but even so, I would not think you would place it on par with one of the best horrors of recent times.
The interesting character is Jessica Chastain, who plays the deranged Lady Lucille. A very different role from her Zero Dark Thirty (Maya) or The Martian (Melissa) and Tom Hiddleston, our own Loki in the Thor series.
I would say a 4/10
– – Krishna