Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak (15)

USA 2015 119 mins  Dir: Guillermo del Toro  Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver

The last time Mia Wasikowska wound up in a remote English gothic pile, spooky events presaged the revelation of grotesque family secrets. Now she’s back in a Corman’s Poe-meets-Hammer analogue of Thornfield Hall, where much the same happens – only with a great deal more bloodshed, sex and violence than Charlotte Bronte ever offered. Guillermo del Toro’s sumptuous, suitably crimson-hued haunted mansion melodrama is in no hurry to get there, its leisurely, portent-packed set-up establishing that feisty 19th century New York aspiring novelist Edith Cushing (Wasikowska) – whose surname was surely chosen deliberately – is especially sensitive to smoky spooks from The Beyond. Specifically, her own dear old dead mum pops up to rattle doorknobs and warn her to beware of the Crimson Peak.

Enter Sir Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston), who’s in town with his frosty sister Lucille (Chastain) to work the English aristo charmer routine in the hope of separating gullible Yanks from their loot. Naturally, our Edith is swiftly smitten, but her canny self-made dad Carter (Beaver) is less easily fooled and starts digging into her suitor’s past. One swift fatal accident later, she’s whisked off to become Sir Thomas’s bride and reside in crumbling Allerdale Hall, which is perched atop a mountain of blood-red clay in a wholly imaginary Cumberland. A triumph of production design that invites us to sit back and drink it all in, this vast, decaying mansion seethes with ghosts and is slowly being absorbed by the gloopy clay that bubbles up through the floorboards. Edith is denied a set of keys and issued with the mandatory “Don’t go down in the basement” warning, while Sir Thomas puts the first tranche of her inheritance to use financing machinery to mine the valuable deposits that threaten to claim his ancestral home.

This magnificently staged, hugely enjoyable, colour-coded fever dream is a more mainstream work than Guillermo del Toro’s finest films, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s because it’s a ripe and macabre psychosexual homage to the gothic romance genre stretching all the way back to those early Daphne du Maurier adaptations Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel. It’s also curiously reminiscent of the recent, little-seen, equally starry Stonehearst Asylum (out now on blu-ray and DVD), with terrific performances from Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain as shiftily conflicted Sir Thomas and his icy, manipulative sibling. If you detect something of a giallo sensibility at play in the film’s rich, heightened tones, you’ll be delighted to find that del Toro delivers the full grand guignol in its closing minutes.