STACK #133 Nov 2016

CINEMA

REVIEWS

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RELEASED: Now Showing DIRECTOR: Guillermo del Toro CAST: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston RATING: MA15+

CRIMSON PEAK

W hen his long gestating H.P. Lovecraft passion project, At the Mountains of Madness , was shelved once again, visionary director Guillermo del Toro threw himself into this lavish period ghost story, and the result is a ravishing fusion of pure gothic melodrama, romance and haunted house horrors. Think Jane Eyre goes to Hell. “Ghosts are real. This much I know.” says Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), who as a little girl received a cryptic warning from her dead mother's spirit to "beware of Crimson Peak". 14 years later the meaning becomes apparent when she's swept off her feet by charming Brit Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), becomes his bride, and is taken to live in his crumbling family estate – a cavernous mansion located atop a mine filled with scarlet clay that regularly oozes through the floor and walls. The decaying Allerdale Hall (which makes Hill House look cosy) is filled with snow flurries, enormous moths and ghosts of the past; it's also home to Sharpe's frosty sister Lucille (a terrific Jessica Chastain) and sinister family secrets which Edith must uncover if she's going to make it out alive. Don't enter Crimson Peak expecting At the mansion of madness.

a conventional haunted house movie like the overrated The Conjuring : the ghosts are largely incidental to a plot – which pays homage to M.R. James, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca , Hammer Horror and the giallo thrillers of Mario Bava – grounded in an era when candelabra- wielding damsels in distress fled down dark corridors in their nightgowns. Art directed to the max, this is a truly gorgeous looking movie, drenched in primary colours (notably red) and the meticulous attention to detail that is del Toro's forte. There's no doubt whatsoever this is a GDT film, with his signature flourishes all present and correct: elaborate production design, wispy apparitions, black umbrellas, steampunk machinery, and bursts of graphic bloodshed. Today's audiences, force-fed a diet of disposable, formula spookshows from Blumhouse productions, will probably find this far too quaint for their taste, but fans of measured, old school ghost stories will love every sumptuous frame. Scott Hocking

FURTHER VIEWING: The Haunting (1963), The Devil's Backbone

NOVEMBER 2015

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