Review: Crimson Peak (2015)

Wow! Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak is one of the best films I've seen this year, deserving of placement alongside The Babadook and What We Do in the Shadows as one of the three best horror-themed releases I've seen recently.

I say "horror-themed" because Crimson Peak is really a gothic romance, just as Shadows is really a comedy-mockumentary despite some explicit gore and a few good scares. Peak is a creepy, supernaturally tinged family melodrama, so superior an example of the cinematic Gothic that it must be named alongside those other two standout films.*

Mia Wasikowska as Edith, the heroine of Crimson Peak.

Plot- and mood-wise, Crimson Peak is a lot like The Woman in Black (2012), only much much better. Peak is what Woman could have been if the latter film had trusted its story, actors, and creepy tone and relied less upon jump-scares accompanied by hamfisted musical stingers.

I am not completely against jump scares, but I do not like "horror" films that rely too extensively on the device. I especially dislike movies that emphasize and/or broadcast every scare with a heavy handed, too-on-the-nose musical cue of some kind. This is what Nigel Floyd and Mark Kermode call "cattle-prod cinema," and I find it dull, pointless, and nerve-wracking.

Nigel Floyd sez: "We like horror films that build up a sense of suspense that is built into the narrative."

No, give me instead what film scholar Daniel Martin calls "restrained horror," a subgenre consisting of films "more suggestive than graphic" that "treat their subject with utter seriousness, jettisoning the [overt] humor" that characterizes films like Scream.**

While the restrained horror films Martin talks about (like Ringu and The Blair Witch Project) are not exactly Gothic films like Crimson Peak, they may be close cousins. Both restrained horror and the Gothic prefer the slow burn over the easy scare. And the use of deliberate restraint to provoke sustained terror, what Nigel Floyd refers to as "cumulative dread" in the video, creates a tone central to the Gothic. As this excellent review explains,

part of what defines the gothic is how paradoxically trusting it is; it relies on audience familiarity for much of its atmosphere and emotional power. We know the girlish innocent will be terrified in the great dark house; we know the gentry are hiding a terrible secret; we know what happens when you unlock Bluebeard’s closet. The gothic isn’t a genre of surprises, it’s a genre of dread, and to dread something, you must first know what it is.

Of course, I would argue that all genres are "trusting" of their audiences and exploit our familiarity with certain tropes and traditions to generate pleasurable effects. But I agree that as an exemplary specimen of the Gothic, Crimson Peak marshals its generic conventions and intertextual references in order to cultivate dread, and that it does so brilliantly and effectively.

My girlfriend, an expert on the British Gothic, tells me that Crimson Peak falls into at least two related traditions. She calls the movie "Victorian gothic meets country house ghost story," a hybridization of elements from literary works including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817).***

Film-genre-wise, Crimson Peak belongs in a class of movie that includes The Others (2001), The Innocents (1961), The Shining (1980), and Rebecca (1940), as well as several film versions of the novels listed above. 

Crimson Peak's inquisitive detective-heroine Edith . . . 

. . . is like Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) from The Innocents, one of the best gothic ghost-story movies you'll ever fuckin' see. 

Similarly, Peak's intense, enigmatic Lucille (Jessica Chastain) . . . 

. . . is a lot like Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) from Hitchcock's Rebecca.  

I will not get into spoiler territory, but I must briefly mention Peak's breathtakingly lush sets and production design. The manor house to which Thomas takes Edith is an amazing feat of set design and construction. One of the most ingenious features of the house is a ragged hole in the roof that allows rain, mist, and snow to penetrate the very air of the main hall, enhancing the atmosphere of decay.†

The film's greatest visual achievement is probably its climactic snow scene, an amazing battle set among the various fixtures of Thomas' mining machinery. There isn't much graphic gore in Crimson Peak, but what violence occurs is brutal and believable, as this scene exemplifies.

And god, the performances. Mia Wasikowska is a particular favorite of mine, but all three principal cast members are superb here. I have never seen Tom Hiddleston, playing the mysterious pretty boy, do anything better. As I learned from this article, the original casting was going to be Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas and Emma Stone as Edith. As I watched the film, I remembered this casting factoid and thanked the universe that the production instead landed Hiddleston and Wasikowska for these roles. And the supporting cast is great too, especially Charlie Hunnam as Alan and Jim Beaver as Edith's father.

This review sounds hazily disappointed that Crimson Peak isn't scarier, yet what does one expect from del Toro? Crimson Peak marks a return to the, well, peak works of the director's early career, the gothic masterpieces The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006).†† Maybe the more appropriate adjective to describe these films is unsettling -- yes, Crimson Peak is unsettling in a slow-burning, emotional, violent, twisted, and melodramatically satisfying way. Or, as AV Club's Genevieve Valentine puts it:

The film isn’t very scary, because it trades so carefully on scares we’ve come to expect. It isn’t very scary because its ghosts aren’t antagonists; they’re a manifestation of generational guilt, sure, but they aren’t here to haunt Edith—they’re here to save her. And the movie’s visual markers—so pristinely devoted to its ancestors in the opening acts—sidestep the ghosts altogether by the climax. Edith stands victorious in the snow, blood-red clay on her white hem and blood spattered across her gown. She’s closed the loop on the vampire narrative, all by herself.

All this plus amazing set design with lots of freaky red ooze. Definitely go see this movie.

Guillermo del Toro sez: "Okay guys, for this next take, both of you will be fully immersed in horrid red filth."

UPDATE 11/5/2015: As the last line of my closing Genevieve Valentine quotation suggests, Crimson Peak solves Dracula's "Mina problem." This past summer and fall, my girlfriend and I watched several film adaptations of Dracula, including F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), Hammer Films' Horror of Dracula (1958), Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979), and even the "sexy" Dracula (1979) starring Frank Langella. One thing we noticed again and again is how every single film version of the tale sells out Mina, diminishing her role in what is, in the source novel, a victory brought about by her research, record-keeping, and diligence. In the novel, Mina is an investigator and a writer, like Crimson Peak's Edith. Yet no film version ever allows her to play that central a role, instead handing off the investigative and vampire-hunting functions to Van Helsing and/or Jonathan Harker.

The closest any film version comes to empowering Mina is Herzog's Nosferatu, in which she is the sole figure who recognizes Dracula's threat and takes steps to stop him. However, Herzog's film ends with Mina sacrificing herself to the vampire rather than destroying him through direct action. The movie ends with Harker, now a vampire himself, riding off across the plains in daylight, perhaps emphasizing the monstrously adaptable and therefore unstoppable nature of vampiric patriarchy but nevertheless doing the deceased Mina no favors.

While Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu ridicules the narrow-minded inefficacy of Harker and Van Helsing, positioning Mina as the only character who comprehends and takes action against the Count . . .

. . . it nevertheless kills Mina off, allowing Harker, himself now a vampire . . .

. . . to escape and presumably wreak havoc on the world. I read this as a critique of the relentless destructive power of patriarchy, yet the film makes this critique at the expense of its only significant female character's life.

As Valentine writes, "It’s notable that the blood-soaked ghosts of Crimson Peak are nearly all women, and all they ever do is communicate sins to help Edith avoid danger." Indeed, for Peak also tells the story of a battle between women for the love of a man. I am surprised I didn't think of this angle when I was initially writing this review because I am a feminist and I enjoy female-centered films. Yet there is so much going on in Crimson Peak from a genre perspective that I got lost in that aspect. I only later zeroed in on the "subversive," feminist implications of Edith's arc and the way in which the film "closes the loop on the vampire narrative" and solves the problem of Mina's longstanding cinematic defanging.

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* Some of my readers may wonder why It Follows is not included in my brief list of top-notch horror of the past year. There is much pleasure to be had in It Follows, David Robert Mitchell's delightful retro homage to late-1970s and early-1980s horror. It Follows takes a Cronenbergian premise -- pretty much the same "sex-as-virus" metaphor that drives Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977) -- and shoots and paces it like John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Shot on location in Detroit, the movie has become something of a phenomenon in film-critical circles this year, earning the number two spot on AV Club's "The 25 Best horror films since 2000" list. I think it deserves all the acclaim it gets. It is a generally excellent horror film. But it just isn't as haunting, memorable, terrifying, or thematically audacious as, say, The Babadook or Crimson Peak. (In fairness, while film genius A.J. Snyder concurs with my feeling that It Follows is mainly "a collection of other people's ideas," this reviewer disagrees with me, arguing that "It Follows is no knockoff.")
** Daniel Martin, "Japan's Blair Witch: Restraint, Maturity, and Generic Canons in the British Critical Reception of Ring." Cinema Journal 48.3 (Spring 2009) pp. 39, 36.
*** The Jane Eyre connection is especially neat-o since Mia Wasikowska played the title role in a superb film version of Jane Eyre in 2011. And Peak's Dracula-ish vampiric themes take on additional resonance given that Tom Hiddleston starred in Only Lovers Left Alive in 2013.
† The sets, settings, and costumes are very important in a Gothic melodrama like this. One of the core concepts underpinning melodrama is that the emotions on display are too great to be captured in mere performances or words, so elements of the stetting including props, costumes, and nonverbal gestures do much of the symbolic work to convey meaning and feelings.
†† If I had to rank all the Guillermo del Toro films I've seen -- not easy since he moves between genres quite a bit -- then Pan's Labyrinth would surely be #1, and The Devil's Backbone would constitute a close second place. Next would be Crimson Peak, perhaps sharing the #3 spot with Hellboy (2004). Pacific Rim (2013) would be #4, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) #5. I have not yet seen his earlier films Cronos (1993) or Mimic (1997).

Pacific Rim = A Great Blockbuster

As the sense of scale here should make clear, Guillermo del Toro's 
superb blockbuster Pacific Rim is a film you should see in the theater.

I just saw Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim last night, and declare it to be one of the two or three best, most enjoyable blockbusters I've seen in the past two years. It is pretty much flawless, in terms of what I want out of a big summer popcorn movie: it is unpretentious, it delivers what it promises, and it even springs a few great surprises I didn't see coming. Most importantly, it is:

(1) Fun, and

(2) Visually stunning.

We mustn't underestimate the power of #1 up there, because my single biggest complaint about many recent blockbusters, particularly those of the Christopher Nolan stripe, is that they take themselves way too goddamn seriously. They get so bogged down in being "gritty" or "dark" or "serious" that they just aren't any fun anymore. This is why, for me, I rate Joss Whedon's The Avengers and Sam Mendes' Skyfall (both 2012) very highly among recent summer blockbusters, but have not yet been motivated to see this year's Man of Steel. To be fair, even without having seen it I would expect Zack Snyder's Superman movie to fulfill my criterion #2 -- I am sure it is visually stunning -- but personally I just have no interest in seeing a "gritty" or "realistic" Superman movie, especially one scripted by David S. Goyer, who I think is an extremely sloppy and inept screenwriter.

But I digress. What makes Pacific Rim so enjoyable and effective? Well, in order to let you know where I'm coming from, let's consult a chart and define a few terms:

First, complex vs. simple: complex plots twist and turn and rely upon narrative "reveals" or big surprises for their tension. Nolan's films are notoriously complex (some would even say convoluted) and I place Star Trek: The Motion Picture in here as another example of this trend.* The Trek film is quite heady and relies upon a mystery that is slowly revealed to the audience: what the hell is "V-ger" and what is it up to? As in Nolan's films, we (the audience) do not know the answer until/as the protagonists gradually figure it out. Die Hard is the same way: Hans Gruber's plan involves layer upon layer of embedded complexity, and not until very near the end do we understand the full scope of it. Sure, as genre films we know generally how these movies will end -- i.e., the good guys will win -- but we are not totally sure how they will win. Major salient facts are withheld along the way.

By contrast, simple blockbusters are those that make pretty clear from the get-go what is at stake; the plots do not depend upon mystery or surprise quite so much. Films like The Avengers and Pacific Rim are of this stripe: there is some major bad guy who needs to be clobbered, but the exact nature of his plans are not really all that important -- usually they can be summed up as "wants to end / rule the world." In Pacific Rim, we know what the film's climax will be about ten or twenty minutes into the movie: Marshal Pentecost (Idris Elba) tells us what the big mission is going to be, and the rest of the film involves our team of heroes fighting defensive battles until their moment arrives to execute that plan. There are a few minor twists but they do not sway us from (or materially change the circumstances of) that Big Battle scheduled for the end of the picture.

Now to the other axis. By "creative" I do not mean complex plots, but rather a visual style and/or tone that differentiates the film from other blockbusters of its type. I guess I mean authorial stamp to some extent, but remember that I am NOT talking about totally violating or hybridizing a genre either, just playing within a genre in a way that makes it appear fresh, e.g. Tim Burton's use of gothic sets and a carnivalesque tone for his two Batman films in 1989 and 1992. Nolan's recent films are also "creative" in this sense, he being the director widely credited with bringing a "gritty," "dark" tone to superhero blockbusters.

"Generic" means films that adhere more closely to the established parameters of their genre, with less evident authorial flourishes or deviations in tone or visual aesthetics.

Please note that I do not privilege "creative" over "generic" -- I have great admiration for films that hew closely to genre conventions but still make the viewing experience exciting. In fact, one of my favorite recent blockbusters, The Avengers, is extremely conventional with respect to plot and other conventions of superhero films, but it does its thing with such witty panache and delightful character interactions that it is completely successful even though it is visually and structurally unremarkable.

"We may not be complicated, but we're fun!"

In his rather scathing review of Pacific Rim, Buffalo-area author and filmmaker Greg Lamberson writes that "there is no real climactic fight that tops everything that came before it, but a corny finale that's telegraphed as soon as Elba comes on screen. Epic fail." However, as I argue above, Pacific Rim's ending is not an epic fail -- though perhaps it fails to be epic -- but rather is exactly what the film promises to deliver given its setup. I for one am rather tired of the notion that the final battle in a blockbuster has to be "bigger" or "more epic" than anything that came before -- I just want it to dramatically resolve the plot of the film. Epicness is overrated.**

Lamberson also states that "not one single character is interesting." Though I disagree with this, I think that in broad strokes it is an accurate statement if not a reasonable one, by which I mean that I would not personally expect del Toro to fully round out his characters and complicate his plots when making a superhero movie like Hellboy or a big summer action blockbuster like Pacific Rim. The generic ground rules and audience expectations here are totally different from those we would expect from artsy psychological thrillers like The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. And frankly, I enjoyed Pacific Rim's characters even though, like Lamberson, I did not find them to be psychologically complex. How many blockbuster protagonists truly are? None that I can think of.

Nevertheless, I accept as a valid critique the notion that some of the key characters in Pacific Rim are not well-rounded enough. Again, I think this is a function of the type of movie it is -- a "simple" blockbuster -- and this factor did not strike me as a major deficiency as I watched the film, yet I admit that would like to know more about the world in which Pacific Rim is set. Maybe, if we are fortunate, we will get a sequel and / or a prequel, as this reviewer suggests.

All that said, I agree with Lamberson that del Toro has set a very high bar for himself with his early films -- I love them a lot and would argue that Pan's Labyrinth definitely belongs on Entertainment Weekly's "100 All-Time Greatest Films" list. But my expectations for Pacific Rim were not directly informed by del Toro's amazing earlier works, except in one specific sense: I assumed the film would be a visual knockout, which it is. The world of Pacific Rim feels very lived-in and "real." With a great many scenes shot at night, Pacific Rim is visually evocative of Blade Runner or Hellboy II, and I love it for its noir-inspired cinematic richness.

Yet despite its dark lighting and post-apocalyptic mise-en-scene, the film's general tone is light, peppy, and fun. I appreciate this very much. While I TOTALLY agree with Lamberson's sentiment that in general, blockbusters these days are running way too long, Pacific Rim never dragged for me the way the second two Lord of the Rings films or the third Nolan Batman film did. Sure, there isn't much laugh-out-loud humor or witty inter-character verbal sparring as in The Avengers, but Pacific Rim does feature a few really fantastic visual gags -- my personal favorite of which involves one of these:

In his own lukewarm review, Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty says of Pacific Rim that "del Toro's monsters are so big, and shot in such unrelenting rainy darkness, that the audience never gets a chance to dissect and fetishize their monstrous anatomies and be swept away by their weirdness." Reading that, I think Nashawaty must have seen a different movie than I did.*** I felt like the film moved pretty quickly from set piece to set piece, spending most of its running time on those spectacular monster battles -- in sum, the film does not skimp at all on mind-blowing, beautifully choreographed and well-shot action sequences. And for that reason alone, I urge my readers to strongly consider seeing Pacific Rim while it is in theaters. It may not be perfect, and it obviously does not "hit the spot" for every (re-)viewer the way it does for me, but it is well worth your time to check out, as del Toro is head and shoulders above most other blockbuster directors in terms of the lushness and lived-in "reality" of his visual style.

The kaiju sez: "Come see my movie or I'll crush your civilization!"

UPDATE 10/14/2014: British critic Mark Kermode agrees with me and has some very smart things to say about what makes Pacific Rim great in the linked video.

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* I realize that this is a bit of a cheat on several levels. For one, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was not released in summer, but December; also, it is not an "action" film, as summer blockbusters, by definition, are. Yet it is a big-budget picture that was released "wide" in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars, so I include it here as a representative of some of the trends I am attempting to illustrate.
** For a cheeky yet accurate discussion of this "epicness" problem in contemporary blockbusters, check out this video review of Man of Steel, especially the part near the end where the reviewers discuss the difference between Snyder's film and Superman II (1980).
*** UPDATE: Since writing this review I came across this article about possible Pacific Rim sequel ideas which includes this illuminating (ha, ha) comment: "My main issue with the dark visuals of Pacific Rim are probably the fault of the 3D projection at my cinema more than the cinematography." This may indeed explain a lot, including Nashawaty's review, assuming he saw the picture in 3D, which notoriously darkens the image. By contrast, I saw the film in 2D -- wearing 3D glasses always gives me headaches.