"Beware of Crimson Peak", a few words, an inexplicable warning from a dark place are the moment that changed Edith Cushing's life forever. If not the meaning, it was the messenger who shaped her character: the skeletal ghost of her mother, who came to her aid in her tender youth, leaving her with an inconvenient passion, for the time, for ghost stories. We are at the end of the century, in a Boston facing the dawn of the 20th century, where Edith, daughter of a real estate magnate, tries unsuccessfully to pursue a career as a writer, until Sir Thomas Sharpe and his sister Lucille arrive from England. Attracted by his fragile charm, Edith abandons the attentions of her friend Alan McMichael, and despite her convictions about aristocrats, succumbs to the attentions of the penniless Sir Thomas. A feeling from which the spark will set off a sequence of disastrous and violent events that will take her to England to Allerdale Hall, his mansion, at the top of a promontory full of soft red clay into which the house slowly sinks.
Today we live under the countless posters produced by Blumhouse at an incredible rate, an era where everything that creaks, bleeds, and screams is considered generically horror. Forget the nuances, as many, if not more, as the shades of gray of another mistreated genre – especially in Italy – science fiction, but those who have always kept them with care and have decided to live alongside them without any doubt is the Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro. A return to cinemas and to his mother genre after the gigantic blockbuster "Pacific Rim", Del Toro re-embraces ghost stories to immerse himself as much as possible in the Anglo-American tradition, drawing avidly from the pages of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, the anxieties of Joseph Le Fanu, the specters of Montague Rhodes James, and the damp past of New England from Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Crimson Peak is more than any other film in his career to plunder the best authors of the unsettling in circulation. Be careful, however, not to fall into error, Del Toro's Crimson Peak does not regurgitate the reference ancestors in the form of explicit citation outward. Just as Quentin Tarantino has always done, the director from Guadalajara plays with his passions rejecting them only in the form of images. Thus we recognize "The Fall of the House of Usher" in the decrepit, solitary, and cold Allerdale Hall, in the countless walls and ruins ruined by the living earth (a reference to Lovecraft's work) we observe the spectral nights spent at Wuthering Heights ("Wuthering Heights"). The explicit citations are others, the call to the famous chemist of the 18th century Henry Cavendish, to Mary Shelley, Guillermo Del Toro's idol and his protagonist Edith Cushing, and here, as is clear, we finally arrive at what is cinema. Because of the Seventh Art, Crimson Peak is a true gem, raw in the American phase, smooth and shining upon landing in England.
The reference cinema belongs to the 1960s, to the productions of Mario Bava in particular, but more than anything we find ourselves in the territory of Terence Fisher, the directorial star of Hammer Films Production, one of whose greatest historical protagonists was none other than the actor Peter Cushing.
The homage (because in toto Del Toro's work co-written by Matthew Robbins is that of a pure and simple homage without pretensions to innovate anything, on the contrary) takes up the articulated settings of the various Dracula and The Mask of Frankenstein and the strong use of color, a distinctive trait that helped Hammer to stay alive (and resurrect) for entire decades. Crimson Peak is color from the title, it adopts white and black and adds red for a return to the theories of the use of color by Vladimir Propp, a scholar of fairy tales (one in particular, by Charles Perrault, will come to mind for many during the viewing), helping the viewer to understand the plot through their own eyes and the immutable sensations they convey with great speed. We are talking about a visual masterpiece and many of the compliments go to Thomas E. Sanders, the mad set designer to the point of indulging Del Toro's perfectionist manias, builder of the stunning environments of Boston and the decrepit Allerdale Hall, but of a film about which we must also discuss the narrative aspect.
Do not expect originality, the plot has many widely predictable elements, but as a good lover of Alfred Hitchcock, Del Toro pushes us to wonder how the characters will react and here we arrive at the fantastic performances of the three protagonists: Mia Wasikowska crosses body and spirit of her Edith, so good only in Stoker we had seen her; Tom Hiddleston combines British charm with the fragility of a caste as ancient as bloodied; Jessica Chastain is a true force of nature, angular in traits and gestures, a sharp knife with a hard handle against which we clash at every step. Charlie Hunnam, in a supporting role, Dr. Alan, does not disappoint, nor does he manage to match his gigantic colleagues.
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