Every love story is a ghost story

Tom Hiddleston and Mia Wasikowska in "Crimson Peak." Image courtesy Universal Pictures

“Crimson Peak” is not a horror film. “Crimson Peak” is not meant to scare or frighten it viewers despite the ghosts and shocks and the titular decrepit mansion. Rather, it's a film for the young romantic at heart, a darker, bloodier version of a Jane Austen novel that emphasizes how easy it is to be tricked into love. The fact that it doubles as a wonderful little ghost story is just icing on the proverbial cake.

As Mia Wasikowska's character Edith states in voiceover when the film opens, ghosts are real, and she's seen them since her mother's spirit offered a nasty little omen when Edith was 10 years old. Fast forward more than a decade to Buffalo, New York, circa 1901, and the woman is an aspiring, if unsuccessful, novelist residing with her self-made industrialist father (Jim Beaver) and courted coyly by local physician Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam).

And then Tom Hiddleston enters the picture as Baron Thomas Sharpe, whose monetary value in life is that tile title, his homestead, Allerdale Hall, in England, and a dream of building a machine to unearth the red clay bubbling beneath his estate. He's in Buffalo to request money for the steam-powered digger, but the request becomes secondary once he begins to woo Wasikowska through flattery and his charming demeanor. A violent family tragedy changes the tone of the relationship as the two are wed and Wasikowska joins Hiddleston at his mansion, which he shares with his rather dour and strange sister Lucille (a terrifyingly icy Jessica Chastain). There is something a bit off about the whole affair though, and Wasikowska develops a strange ailment as her suspicions about the place – known as Crimson Peak to the locals – and her new family grow.

The ghosts, almost always female in nature, enter the film en force during this stage of the action, drifting and shambling through “Crimson Peak” with intensity and strangeness. These entities are awful figures, conjured and filmed in such a way to evoke minor terrors and trembles from the audience with their raspy voices and skeletal frames covered in a sickening red clay. They are scary figures, but, strangely enough, the ghosts are not designed to scare the audience; this is a Guillermo del Toro film, after all, and the man rarely uses the supernatural in a malevolent fashion, Like the ghosts in “The Devil's Backbone” and fantastical creatures in “Pan's Labyrinth,” “Crimson Peak's” phantasms are benevolent beings that offer guidance to the living. There is horror to be found in the spirits in “Crimson Peak,” but the film uses those specters as a means of expressing love, a metaphor for memories and feelings: as the saying goes, every love story is a ghost story.

“Crimson Peak” is about the virginal love a young woman finds with a gentleman suitor in traditional Gothic literature. Hiddleston – whose off-kilter and dandified good looks fit the role gorgeously – is in effect a less gruff Mr. Darcy, and the audience nods in approval when the film's dapper and charming leading man lures the innocent Wasikowska into his web. At least until the filmmakers reveal how toothless he is when compared to the women who orbit his existence. Much of the action in “Crimson Peak” is started and carried trough by women, whether its the ghosts, Wasikowska investigating the decaying remains of Allerdale Hall or Chastain engaging in chilling, perturbing acts of weirdness and quiet rage. They're mirror images of each other, Wasikowska the virginal naif dreamer still treated as a child and Chastain the hardened sexual pragmatist corrupted by a rather strange childhood. They battle for Hiddleston's affection, to see which of them can capture and retain the heart of the most important man in their respective lives; Hiddleston is the Olive Oyl to Wasikowska's Popeye and Chastain's Bluto.

It's a nice little and subtle inversion of the traditional trope of having men wrestle for the love of a damsel in physical or economical distress, as well as a clear indication del Toro and frequent collaborator Matthew Robbins have a little more on their minds than a few simple scares. For all the silliness that occurs – a few scenes play out much more humorously and with more camp than del Toro and Robbins anticipated – and a really obvious twist, “Crimson Peak” continually plays with what the audience thinks should occur, setting up obvious scenarios only to take the path less traveled. It won't scare the pants off an audience, but “Crimson Peak” is smart, and it will make viewers swoon a bit for the innocence of first love spite of themselves.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 119 minutes

Genre: Drama

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Target audience: Guillermo del Toro fans and anyone down for a strange romantic tale.

Take the whole family?: Nope.

Theater or Netflix?: Makes for a fun theater trip, just to hear the audience squirm a bit during the more graphic moments.

Does the film capture the Gothic aesthetic?: Most definitely. “Crimson Peak” is absolutely stunning visually, especially once the action shifts to Allerdale Hall. The manor is erected as a home on the verge of falling apart completely, with red ooze seeping through the walls and up from the floors and white snow contrasting the house's bloodiness. One thing del Toro has always done well is set up the right ambiance for his films, and he does so brilliantly with the design of Allerdale Hall and the trinkets and dolls on the inside; for a film that is not a horror flick, the vibe is perpetually eerie.

Watch this as well?: “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe works as an excellent, short and literary companion piece. In terms of film, check out Werner Herzog's adaptation of “Nosferatu”; the vampire in his version is a lonely, cursed romantic figure searching for an end to his misery.