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Rating: Guillermo Del Toro seems to have fully dedicated himself to a cinema that precisely points to the guardian deities of his imagination. After paying homage in Pacific Rim to kaijū eiga à la Ishirō Honda and the colossal robots of Japanese animation, seasoning it all with a Lovecraftian touch, with Crimson Peak he turns to exploring the deepest roots of his auteur signature, going well beyond Lovecraft or Poe to reach the dawn of modern fantastic literature. The main references of the film are to be found indeed in the proto-romantic tradition of the English Gothic novel of the late 18th century, the one that led from Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, paving the way for the dark and gloomy imagination of much of mature Romanticism.
Crimson Peak can be considered from this perspective the most cultured and citation-heavy film by the Mexican director. The literary model is obviously mediated and filtered through the history of cinema: according to Del Toro himself, it is an attempt to revive the horror cinema of Hollywood's golden age, that of the 30s and 40s. While bringing it into a current dimension, the film meticulously respects all the dictates of the revived genre, opting even for archaic linguistic solutions, such as iris-out fades. Every frame exudes cinephile erudition and a love for the cinema of the past, among distant echoes and precise citations (the most obvious reference Hitchcock, citing at least Rebecca, Vertigo, and especially Notorious, but Bava and the room 237 of The Shining also return).
The attempt to create a modern Gothic novel for the screen can be said to have succeeded, for better or for worse. Of the 18th-century novels and their cinematic counterparts, Del Toro does not merely reproduce the atmospheric suggestion and gloomy, dark tones on which the horror component relied: another element emerges strongly, the sentimental-melodramatic one, which constituted the second pillar on which the structure of Gothic narratives relied. The plots of such works aimed to engage the audience through the exposition of the unfortunate events of poor young women, innocent victims of the desires of fictitious counts or lustful monks. The characters were often flat, the developments artificial and improbable.
Similarly, in Crimson Peak, the writing level shows evident limits. The plot is entirely based on the easy device of the protagonist's supernatural perceptions, making the paranormal element a mere narrative function; the characters undergo sudden and unconvincing evolutions; the plot twists (which are supposed to be sensational) are predicted less than fifteen minutes into the film, and the unraveling of the mystery plunges everything into a disheartening banality, stripping the film of much of its charm. But far from being a conscious choice of philological recovery, the roughness of the screenplay (in the face of sophisticated and brilliant dialogues, once again imitating classic cinema) reconfirms a structural lack in Del Toro's cinema.
The fact is that Del Toro has never had the makings of a storyteller, but rather that of a designer. His films do not shine for originality or structural solidity, but for the extraordinary imaginative shaping of worlds and creatures that he unleashes to the limit of horror vacui. In Crimson Peak, this visionary quality is harnessed and regimented in service of the topoi of the Gothic, yet it is effectively expressed in the vivid color contrasts and the stunning visual moments offered by direction and cinematography in a state of grace. The formal perfection is pursued with a meticulousness that almost flirts with excessive calligraphy and baroque style (to which the lavishness of the settings and costumes also contributes), and the staging is absolutely pictorial in the masterful management of spaces, lights and shadows, and the various tones at play.
Despite lacking rhythm and bite, Crimson Peak enchants and engages purely for its aesthetic value: the very title encapsulates both the strengths and weaknesses of a film that is entirely based on the symbolic suggestion of an evocative image, that of snow turning red. As for the casting choices, the tension-filled triangle between Mia Wasikowska, who continues the gallery of unhappy 19th-century women inaugurated with Jane Eyre and soon to expand with Madame Bovary, Tom Hiddleston, skilled in sketching an ambiguous and multifaceted character, and Jessica Chastain, who wears the Hitchcockian morbid and obsessive garb of a new Fosca (if not for her beauty), works perfectly, infusing credibility and charisma to the otherwise not entirely successful protagonists.
7.5
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