Crimson Peak

Funerals rarely look as funereal as they look in Crimson Peak. These are outfits that practically scream: we are going to take a dead person and bury them right in the fucking GROUND.

I would like Guillermo del Toro to design my mausoleum, please.

Man, Crimson Peak is a great looking movie. It's lean on plot, and full of characters you've seen before doing things you've seen before, many many times before, but you can't throw a rock in that movie without hitting some lovely melodramatic Gothic architectural doodad or other, and the characters constantly walk around swathed in yards and yards of dramatically swishing diaphanous translucent fabric that swishes around them, being super dramatic and translucent and diaphanous.

There is a funeral near the beginning of the movie with a black coffin processing toward a huge, elaborately carved stone monument, with men in top hats and women all in black with black netting over their faces, and del Toro loves showing us that funeral so much that not too long afterwards he needs to show us ANOTHER funeral, only this time it has to be raining so everybody can be holding black umbrellas that go with their black top hats and dresses and face-netting.

To demonstrate how simple the plot is, here is a fairly complete summary of it in only seventy-six words: a girl falls in love with a mysterious man from far away. They marry and she returns with him to his home, only to find that the home is full of secrets. For a long time, she wonders what the secrets are, and then she finds out what they are, and they are kind of fucked up. After that, some perilous things happen, but she will probably make it through the peril and be fine afterwards.

But for heaven's sake, most of the movie is set in a mansion where there's a hole in the roof that constantly has leaves or snow falling langorously through it and landing in an elegant, melancholy pile on the floor, and where blood-red glop oozes up between the floorboards and leaks down the walls and although the movie makes some bullshit excuse about how the house is built on top of a clay mine and the clay is very red, Guillermo del Toro just wants to make the house look like it's bleeding. And you might well ask, given that the house is in a barren clay field with hardly any trees, and of the few trees there are, none come even close to being as tall as the house, well then those leaves that are falling so evenly and majestically through the roof of that red-glop-bleeding house, where the hell are they coming from? FROM THE FEVERED, BAROQUE IMAGINATION OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO, THAT'S WHERE.

A part of me wishes that Crimson Peak had been a silent film. The storytelling is so visual that if all of the dialogue had been relegated to title cards I don't think I would have cared. Ingmar Bergman said, "for me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema," and the interplay between Mia Wasikowska's worried, china-doll face surrounded by a weeping-willow-shaped mane of blonde hair, and Tom Hiddleston's weird, bony, craggy face that almost makes you worry he's about to die of consumption,* tells more of the story than the words of the script do.

Should you go see it? Eh, this is a minor del Toro film. It lacks the psychological complexity of Pan's Labyrinth or The Devil's Backbone, the characters are so thinly sketched that it's hard to even give a shit when it looks like they're about to die, and when they do (spoiler: some of them do) the deaths are only impactful because they happen in really viscerally gross ways. The film also suffers from the absence of del Toro's regular cinematographer, Guillermo Navarro. That said, if you love his work, even a minor del Toro film is a delight. Go to this movie to spend two hours enfolded in its lovely del Torian atmosphere, look at the pretty costumes and weird fluttering insects, marvel at the giant steampunk gears without which no GdT movie is complete, and watch yet another mime-like creature performance by Doug Jones, who once again does that funny thing with his hands where he spreads his fingers out really wide and then curls them inward one by one, starting with his pinkie and ending with his index finger, just as he did when he played the faun and the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth, Abe Sapien in Hellboy, and that weird angel of death creature in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. There are worse ways to spend an evening.


*Whatever the hell that is.