Crimson Peak is the new haunted house/spook show movie from Guiermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hell Boy, Pacific Rim, etc)… or, at least that’s what the advertising is lying to you about. This is not a ghost story and its not a haunted house movie, it’s a gothic romance with ghosts in it (as the movie relates to the audience in a too-clever meta narrative way). The problem is that the trailers and commercials promise one thing and the movie delivers something very different. Put it this way: if you took the ghosts out of the movie, you’d have the exact same movie.
But is the movie good as a gothic romance, regardless of the marketing? Well, not really no. It’s too predictable, the characters behave irrationally and we tend to be smarter than them, and we’re asked, I guess, to favor one character who doesn’t deserve it and does nothing to earn it. The first half of the movie takes place in NY and is a kind of romance between Tom Hiddelston’s old world baron character and Mia Wasikowska’s young writer…. that’s an hour of the movie that unravels slowly until we actually get to England and the titular Crimson Peak… the world’s most decrepit mansion (ridiculously so… the roof is caved in, the house is sinking into red clay which gives them an excuse to have “Blood” seeping up from the floor boards, etc.)
The basic premise is that Hiddelson and his sister played by Jessica Chastaine are trying to get money from American industrialists for some kind of earth mining machine to harvest the red clay around their ancestral home. The industrialist is murdered and Hiddelson marries his daughter (Wasikowska) and it might have been more interesting if they didn’t tell us right away that the brother and sister are up to no good. But they reveal that early and slowly you come to realize that A) you are much smarter than the Wasikowska characters because we know she’s in danger and who the bad guys are and B) the actual plot has been done before many times before and is utterly predictable. I was hoping for a sudden twist to justify how by-the-numbers the plot was but hat never comes. I think maybe they though if they threw in some ghosts it would be somehow different.
As to those ghosts – it’s almost to the movie’s credit that they don’t have any impact on the movie because they are entirely too CGI and visible from the first couple minutes of the movie. It’s hard to find the spooks creepy if they are so visible and so artificial. Maybe if they kept them in shadow more often, they’d have been effective. But no, they add nothing to the movie besides a bit of padding to the run time (and they occasionally point at things).
The final 15 or 20 minutes of the movie are actually pretty good and suspenseful… once the motivations are revealed and our main character doesn’t have to be dumb and people start going nuts, the movie picks up for a pretty good final act. The set of the house looks amazing as far as the production design goes… even if the house is ridiculously over-the-top.
Skip this movie… as a ghost story, it’s a failure. As a gothic romance, it’s been done before and it’s super predictable, the characters make dumb choices, and we are asked to suddenly side with a character who is proven to be otherwise nonredeemable (maybe there were some cut scenes). A real disappointment, especially if you wanted a good Halloween flick.
Score: 66