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By Sandra Olmsted

Writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, Crimson Peak, wallows in the subgenre of Gothic horror by including the textbook tropes, such as an ancient, haunted castle with subterranean dungeons and secret passageways, mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, bloody hands, moaning ghosts, and a damsel in distress,. Add in violent emotions related to terror, anguish, and love.

While del Toro hits all the marks for the traditionally Gothic story, making Crimson Peak pleasurably terrifying, the film is not intense and exciting horror or gratifyingly intriguing like del Toro’s earlier genre films: The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy, or Pan’s Labyrinth. Yet, there are moments in Crimson Peak which will startle the audience or make then think, but they are far apart in this slow-moving film.

In this macabre melodrama, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), the main character, dreams of being a writer and taking her manuscript to her father’s friend to publish. Unfortunately, he expected a romance, not a ghost story. Sent home to add a romance angle to her book, she expresses to her supportive, loving father, Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver), the desire to type her novel at his office. Being a doting parent, Carter, a widower, consents, and while at his large, successful building firm, Edith meets baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who has come to America to find an investor for his mining machine for the blood-red clay on his land. He had already sought investments in several European cities. Tom makes Edith fall in love with him, and since Carter doesn’t like Tom or his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), he buys them off to leave immediately and to break Edith’s heart.

Then Carter dies suddenly, under circumstances which Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), Edith’s longtime admirer, considers suspicious. Because Edith has no family left, friends, like Alan, watch helplessly as Edith marries Tom and leaves for his ancestral home in Cumberland, England, which she learns too late is nickname Crimson Peak because the clay colors the snow red. In fact, the dilapidated mansion is sinking into the hilltop’s blood-red clay and everything is being colored by the “chemicals in the clay.”

Back in America, Alan continues to believe that Carter’s death was not an accident, but as her lawyer keep him posted on the liquidation of the Cushing’s holdings and household, there is little Alan can do for the woman he loves.

At the opening of the film, the ghost of Edith’s mother, tries to warn the girl to beware of Crimson Peak, and Edith has seen spirits ever since, and she is soon seeing horrible ones in her new home. Not only has she seen very frightening ghosts in the house, which lead her to clues, but she suspects that Lucille is prisoning her. Does Tom love her enough to save her? Will Alan get to Edith before she signs the final papers transferring all her money to the Sharpes and sealing her fate?

With Crimson Peak running 119 minutes, it is a long wait to find out, and the suspense is diluted. Although rated R for bloody violence, some sexual content and brief strong language, the textbook Crimson Peak feels like a film to be shown in a Gothic literature class and an excellent companion activity to reading Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). The terrific performances, especially Chastain’s which is a tour de force into portraying insanity and evil, save the film from being boring. For a “pleasurably terrifying” time, see Crimson Peak, a Universal Pictures release, which is in theaters now.

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