New movie, so, spoilers.
Short version: Crimson Peak kinda sucked. What was supposed to be an afternoon at the moo-vees turned into getting mugged by a ghost in the parking lot and then waking up two-and-a-half hours later in a dumpster with $12 missing and a giant hole in the memory.
This is disappointing because del Toro is usually much better than this. Exhibit A is The Orphanage, a very sad tale that features very creative ghosts that tell an otherwise uncomplicated, humanistic story. Crimson Peak is also sad, simple and humanistic, but covered so much mud the big reveal at the end turns into a colossal letdown.
I've since forgotten all of the character's names so we're going to call our protagonist Flopsy. Flopsy is the daughter of an American steel tycoon in the vein of Andrew Carnegie, and a dreamer, writer, and while the movie alludes to her supposed feminism, the writers clearly didn't research it or wait for The Suffragette to come out and just watch that. Flopsy sees her mom's ghost from a young age that cryptically warns her to "beware of Crimson Peak."
Okay, let's stop here a second. How cryptic is "beware of Crimson Peak" anyway? I know geography wasn't the best in nineteen-oh-whatever but a clearly educated daughter of wealth like Flopsy would've at least figured there can't be too many red goddamned mountains in the world. We'll get back to this in a minute, but, right? Seriously.
Flopsy's heart goes aflutter when a handsome stranger of English old money blows into town and solicits old dad for some startup cash. This goes on for far too long before dad dies under mysterious circumstances and Flopsy marries, uh, well, now his name is Gonad.
And we'll stop here again just to say that I have no problem with a long introduction or extended periods of quiet punctuated with crash-bang action. The original silent Phantom of the Opera is probably the best example of this. But the shift in gears from Downton Abbey turn o' the century baron's drama to full-blown supernatural horror is so jarring that Crimson Peak actually feels like two different movies smashed into one.
Gonad, of course, takes his new bride to his home of Crimson Peak -- the audience doesn't find out about the name until later, but for Christ's sake it's a mountain peak with special blood-red clay oozing out of every one of it's earthy pores. For an aspiring writer Flopsy lets that little bit of foreshadowing whiz right on by. And that isn't the end of what amounts to a long string of increasingly poor decisions on her part.
Gonad lives with is creepy-ass sister, a turn of bat shit loco brought to the screen wonderfully by Jessica Chastain, and since I've forgotten her character's name as well she is now called Nutso. Gonad and Nutso live alone in an isolated mansion with large swaths of caved in roof with no cleaning staff and did I mention it's sinking? Flopsy is seen at turns taking these revelations with something between bemusement and tacit acceptance as Nutso follows her around the house pushing nasty tea and Gonad seemingly refuses to sleep with her. Flopsy sees ghosts of course, but the siblings sans sanity tell her she's crazy and to drink more tea.
Another really disappointing aspect of Crimson Peak are the ghosts themselves, somewhere between Sadako of Ring-fame and animated to look like video game monsters ripe for the chopping. And despite del Toro's penchant for design and insane detailed (Exhibits B and C: Pacific Rim and the Hellboy movies), the ghosts are just people sans skin. For crap's sake, even the Crimson in the movie's title is a gimmick. The remake of Poltergeist did this too: subbing some genuinely terrifying monsters for a bunch of blurry human shapes, betraying that mix of laziness, budget constraints and not wanting to animate anything that's going to look like absolute crap in six months.
Anyway, the totally-not-scary-at-all ghosts point Flopsy to some unsavory tips about her new hubby (as if the fact that he comes from wealth and can't afford keep the goddamned snow out of the living room isn't enough). And one night she follows the spirit's lead to the movie's dramatic denumont and...
Nope, can't even finish that sentence with any degree of seriousness because it's just Flowers in the Attic. What the fuck guys?
Flopsy walks into Nutso going all nutso over Gonad's gonads and it all falls together in declarative exposition: Nutso murdered Dad so her brosband could sap her inheritance while wifey dies slowly of poisoning. Talk about jumping on a bandwagon five years after it left the station. Damn.
The throwdown between Flopsy and Nutso as the house sinks and the coveted clay stains the snow rouge is full-on fun, but does something I very much dislike in that it makes Gonad the ultimate hero. He predictably has a change of heart and sides with Flopsy over his wifester, prompting her stab-laden freak-out in the first place. In the end, it's Gonad's ghost (a ghostnad!?) that distracts Nutso long enough for Flopsy to land the killing blow, complete with cheeky one-liner.
I said before that Flopsy gets introduced as a sort of proto-feminist but the writers clearly had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Having her take out Nutso with her own feminine fists of fury would've been a nice return to form after her adventures in incestuous polygamy. But because, or at least as I infer, she cannot kill Nutso alone and needs Gonad's help, the message is that his redemption is complete because he orchestrates his evil sister's death.
Before I forget, Charlie Hunnmann is also in the movie, is the only other person who can see or is interested in ghosts and shows up for the final showdown and holy crap does that character arc go nowhere fast.
As a Primus album once said, they can't all be zingers, and this one doesn't so much zing as it slowly buzzes on a descending scale, as though one was blowing a kazoo at his bosses birthday party the day he got fired. If a studio is going to toss money away incorrectly using a talent and vision like del Toro's on overused and insensitive incest shockers, they might as well just freaking fund At the Mountains of Madness already.
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