Crimson Peak (2015)

Official trailer

Crimson Peak is Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 American gothic romance horror film. The film depicts American aspiring novelist Edith Cushing in early-twentieth-century Buffalo who marries English aristocrat Thomas Sharpe and moves with him to his decaying ancestral mansion Allerdale Hall in Cumbria. Thomas’s sister Lucille occupies the house, which slowly subsides into a clay pit beneath it, with red clay seeping through floorboards and walls. Edith begins experiencing visitations from ghosts while gradually learning that her new family hides dangerous secrets. Mia Wasikowska plays Edith.

Tom Hiddleston plays Thomas Sharpe. Jessica Chastain plays Lucille Sharpe. Charlie Hunnam plays Edith’s American suitor Dr. Alan McMichael. Del Toro and Matthew Robbins wrote the screenplay. Legendary Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 55 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 75 million dollars worldwide.

I’m a sucker for how Crimson Peak looks, and I’ll forgive it a lot for that. Every frame of that rotting house makes me want to stop and stare, and Chastain is clearly having the time of her life. What keeps it at a 7 is a story thinner than the set it’s built on. I guess the family secrets well before Edith does, and a gothic romance needs more mystery than this one has.

The film is del Toro’s principal commercial gothic horror production and the work that most clearly extends his earlier The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) sensibility into English-language gothic romance territory. The visual design is among the most maximalist of any recent gothic production.

The mansion was constructed as a five-story functioning set with working elevators and breathing walls. The Wasikowska performance grounds the visual extravagance with restrained period acting. The Chastain performance commits fully to the gothic villainess tone the source demanded.

Commercial reception was mixed because the studio marketed the film as horror but works principally as gothic romance with horror elements. The genre confusion damaged initial reception but the picture has aged into cult standing.

The Genre Question

Universal marketed the film as horror. Del Toro repeatedly stated in interviews that the film was a gothic romance instead of a horror film. The distinction matters. Horror promises sustained dread and frequent scares. Gothic romance promises atmospheric foreboding, dangerous secrets in old houses, and emotional intensity that may or may not include supernatural elements. The actual film disappointed audiences who arrived expecting horror.

The genre confusion damaged initial reception. The film opened weak and never recovered commercially. Later home video and streaming engagement has produced cult standing that the initial release didn’t generate. Audiences who arrive with correct genre expectations engage the film successfully. The marketing failure instead of the film itself produced the commercial disappointment. The lesson applies broadly to mismatched marketing of work that doesn’t fit conventional genre categories.

I blame the studio for this one. Selling a slow, swooning ghost romance as a scare machine guarantees people show up expecting something the film never meant to give them, and it cost a lovely film the audience that would have adored it.

The Production Design

Allerdale Hall was constructed as a five-story practical set instead of rendered digitally. The mansion contains working elevators, functional doorways, multiple staircases, and rooms that connect in spatial ways the camera could move through continuously. The walls breathe through hidden bellows that pump air through fabric panels. The red clay floor seeps actual red liquid through built-in plumbing. The roof has a considerable hole that allows snow and rain to fall through into the central hall.

The decision to build the practical set produced particular effects digital construction couldn’t have achieved. Actors interacted with the actual environment instead of green screens. Light fell on real surfaces. Sound recordings captured real acoustics of the constructed space. The production cost exceeded what digital alternatives would have required. Del Toro argued that the practical approach was necessary for the gothic atmosphere the film aimed at. The argument was correct.

The house is the reason I’d watch this again. Walls that breathe, red clay oozing up through the floorboards, snow falling through the hole in the roof into the hall: it’s the most beautiful haunted house I can think of on film, and it thrills me that every bit of it was physically there.

The Chastain Performance

Jessica Chastain plays Lucille Sharpe as a woman whose composure barely contains the rage and obsession that drive her.

The performance commits fully to gothic villainess tone that conventional acting trends had abandoned. Chastain plays Lucille at the level of operatic theatrical performance instead of naturalistic film acting. The method was correct for the material. Restrained naturalism would have failed the gothic romance form.

Chastain studied silent film acting and Victorian stage performance during preparation. The result is a performance that uses extensive physical staging, controlled vocal range, and deliberate pacing that contemporary film acting typically avoids. The performance has divided critics. Some find it too theatrical. Others find it the film’s principal achievement. Both readings have merit. The performance works for audiences who accept the gothic tone and fails for audiences who want contemporary realism.

I’m firmly with the critics who call Chastain the film’s principal achievement. She goes big and never blinks, playing Lucille like a woman who’s held her breath her whole life, and when she finally lets go I believe every inch of it.

Is Crimson Peak worth watching?

Crimson Peak is worth watching, and I’d push anyone who loves del Toro or gothic romance toward it. The house is a wonder, Chastain goes all in, and the practical design gives it a solidity no digital mansion could match. It’s a 7 because the story never matches the building, and the secrets play as confirmations more than surprises. The studio sold it as horror and damaged it on arrival, and it deserved better.

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