Crimson and cleaver

Guillermo del Toro likes the color red. A lot. His Hellboy was a celebration of rich vermilion hues, as was Blade II. He also likes insects a lot, as movies such as Mimic and Pan’s Labyrinth might suggest. Mostly he possesses a rich visual sensibility that seems to go directly from his mind to the drawing board (have you seen his Moleskine sketchbooks online?) and straight to the screen.

But he’s not always the most lucid of directors, and though his latest, a “gothic romance” called Crimson Peak (there’s that favorite color again), has some great visuals involving snow that’s awash in seeping red clay, or butterflies and moths bashing around gothic castles like the skittering thoughts of a twisted psyche, there’s not really a lot about it that makes much sense in a compelling way. Originally cast with Benedict Cumberbatch and Emma Stone in mind, the final cut substitutes Tom Hiddleston and Mia Wasikowska as young lovers Sir Thomas Sharpe (he of the rundown and dilapidated 19th-century mansion) and Edith, an aspiring ghost story writer who’s advised to add “a few love scenes” to her manuscripts.

That’s basically what we get in Crimson Peak: a bunch of ghosts lurking around Edith’s life and the haunted and clay-oozing Allerdale Hall, plus a couple love scenes that border on the edge of porno. Add to that quite a bit of nasty gore in between that involves, naturally, the color red.

As our romantic leads, Wasikowska and Hiddleston come off as a bit mannered, though Jessica Chastain adds some hearty scenery-chewing as Thomas’ sister, Lucille Sharpe, bearer of the family crest ring (also ruby red) and instantly recognizable as a jealous and potentially threatening sibling.

The film echoes quite a few Hitchcock movies — Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier is all over this movie) with its jealous caretaker; Suspicion, and especially Notorious with its slow-poisoning motif — though it never surrenders fully to the spell of those classic movies, which masterfully blend gothic romance, treachery and dark motives. Psychologically, the script by del Toro and Matthew Robbins could have used a polish-up by master Hitchcock scriptwriter Ben Hecht (who made Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s quarreling lovers so intriguing in Notorious). Sadly, Hecht’s long dead; but the movie itself has no trouble trucking with the dead, introducing us to its first poltergeist in the opening jerk-shock scene in which Edith recounts how she first began to believe in ghosts. It’s the sort of ghost that pops up in full wraith mode, breathing in Edith’s ear (with breath you just know has to be horrifying) that she should “Stay away from Crimson Peak!” Audience members might end up concluding the same thing.

About halfway through, I also came to agree with the ghost, and some of the problems arise from a jarring juxtaposition of tones — the movie veers from gothic lovers sent on the run, to elderly men getting their heads caved in at a gentlemen’s club sauna in gloriously gruesome detail. There’s something to be said for shock and horror, and there’s something to be said for gothic longing, but this movie doesn’t say either thing particularly well.

Really, we expect more from del Toro, whose last film, Pacific Rim, was (I felt) underappreciated by the very audience it slavishly meant to satisfy. And his Hobbit entry was spirited. When his heart is focused on a project, it can be intoxicating, even if he does recycle the dead kid/ghost theme throughout most of his movies. The difference is that a masterpiece like Pan’s Labyrinth held you in its hypnotic web long after the movie ended; Crimson Peak keeps lifting you out of the movie, with period lines that seem more like a parody of the Wuthering Heights tragic languor he might have been going for. It feels instead like a rehash of Tim Burton on a really bad day — such as the one when he chose to direct Dark Shadows.

Hiddleston and Wasikowska try to inject life into the gothic proceedings, but once they hit that crumby old mansion, you can’t for a moment believe that Edith (with her distressing crazy-doll hair and outfits) would stick around for even more than a night in such a dump. Hiddleston is (reportedly) a big female draw, so perhaps I’m missing out on some brilliant level of integrity to his acting. To me, the whole thing seemed like ersatz horror.

And if it’s going to be ersatz horror, at least Chastain had the right idea by sinking her teeth (fangs, whatever) into her role. She goes bananas here in precisely the way you might, if forced to play earth mother types for most of your career (save for Zero Dark Thirty), or forced to deal with a script that’s not even much invested in its own psychology.

Pre-release, del Toro made much of the tribute his ghost story pays to ‘60s classics such as The Haunting (directed by Robert Wise) and The Innocents (based on Henry James and scripted by Truman Capote); but it lacks those films’ tightly claustrophobic mood and unnerving tone. Sure, the interiors of Allerdale Hall are lush and gorgeous to look at, but the tone of dark introspection is cast aside by sequences — like a kitchen knife fight that involuntarily brings to mind the recent spoof comedy Spy — that seem airlifted in from another movie.

Del Toro also raised the inevitable comparison to Kubrick’s The Shining, but while the Mexican director’s sets are quite something to look at — snow filtering down through deteriorated ceilings, moths affixed to decaying walls, and ancient creaking elevators at the ready — there’s nothing here to match the psychological tension of Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel.

Instead, del Toro’s haunted mansion seems like a short-lived theme park attraction at Universal Studios or Disney World: lots of sizzle, little steak. And make that steak extra rare and bloody, please.

Blood related: Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain play siblings locked together by secrets.