There has been some consternation about the marketing of Crimson Peak. It has been sold to viewers as a baroque horror film, one that mixes lush imagery with cheap jump scares. Director Guillermo del Toro, on the other hand, explained in a "foreword" distributed to writers attending a preview screening that his latest film is a "Gothic romance": "heightened melodrama layered with a lot of darkness and the Gothic atmosphere of a dark fairy tale."
No wonder, then, that audiences polled by Cinemascore gave Crimson Peak a B-minus, the worst grade received by a film opening last weekend. It’s not surprising because audiences hate being lied to, for starters. But Crimson Peak has its own undeniable problems, one that made lying to prospective viewers almost unavoidable: It is beautiful and well-acted, expertly staged and shot, but tonally very uneven, veering wildly from one style of film to another with little warning.
After opening on a brief shot of Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) in the snow—a cut on her cheek, what appears to be blood on the ground—we flash back to her childhood. She knows ghosts are real, she tells us, because she first saw one after her mother died. Though terrifying in appearance, the apparition of dearly departed Mom comes to comfort and offer a warning: "Beware of Crimson Peak." The warning is delivered again some years later to Edith as an adult right before the arrival of Sir Thomas Sharpe, Baronet (Tom Hiddleston), about whom more in a bit.
Though the spooks that litter Crimson Peak take on a typically creepy del Toro-esque design—disproportionate limbs; long, deformed faces; wispy tendrils whipping about, blown by an unfelt breeze; brought to life by del Toro regular Doug Jones—they are, generally, helpful in nature. They are eerie, but not scary, and their onscreen activities are treated with more subtlety and care than the monsters in your average horror film.
Sharpe and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), are the real terrors. Titled and entitled Brits from a spent bloodline and nearly spent fortune, the Sharpes are in America attempting to earn financing for a machine that will help them excavate a blood-red clay from beneath their creaking, collapsing home. Unable to earn the respect of, and an investment from, Edith’s father, Carter (Jim Beaver), Thomas and Lucille earn a stroke of good luck when the old man is mysteriously, brutally, murdered.
And it is brutal, Carter’s murder. This is the biggest problem with Crimson Peak. One moment we’re in a costume drama where Thomas and Edith are waltzing by candlelight; the next we’re in a slasher film where an old man’s head is being bashed violently and repeatedly into a porcelain sink, his face caved in as blood pools around him. One moment Edith is walking through a park, marveling at the beautiful butterflies as we appreciate the costume design that causes Wasikowska to mimic the Monarch; the next Lucille, spindly and black-clad, has placed the winged insect in the midst of a pile of ants and we zoom in, watching the insects chow down on the eyes of the beautiful butterfly.
As with any del Toro movie, it’s worth watching for his attention to detail alone. Thomas and Lucille’s manor, where the final two-thirds or so of the film takes place as Edith attempts to uncover the Sharpes’ dark secrets, has walls that ooze crimson clay and natural wind tunnels created by holes in the walls and ceiling. The house bleeds and breathes, fitting for a mansion in which many violent murders have taken place. Crimson Peak is not a movie that will be accused of subtlety—the dialogue is occasionally laugh-out-loud silly and every twist is telegraphed 20 minutes ahead of time—but it is worth watching.
Even if it’s not a horror film.
If it’s horror you’re after, then Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension will be more to your liking. The sixth entry in the venerable microbudget found footage horror mainstay, The Ghost Dimension is, supposedly, also the last.
Originally a simple, cheap horror film whose thrills were predicated on the horror of unexplained door openings and closings in a new house, the Paranormal Activity series has developed a whole mythology about witches and covens and demons and inter-dimensional doors and time travel to explain the spooky goings-on in the first film.
Adding layer upon layer to the mythology gives the series a reason to keep going, I suppose, but it also detracts from the thing that made the original entry so compelling and effective. Whereas Paranormal Activity relied on little more than cameras capturing odd shadows, random noises, and the weird night-time movements of Katie (Katie Featherton) in order to generate terror, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension actually shows the audience what is making everything go bump in the night: a smoky wraith that can be felt by anyone—especially when it's angry—but can only be seen by those using a mysterious VHS camcorder.
That wraith, a demon who goes by the name Tobi, has been haunting the victims of the series since the beginning. Tobi, previously the playmate of Katie and her sister Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown), now wants to claim Leila (Ivy George) from her parents Ryan (Chris J. Murray) and Emily (Brit Shaw). If he gets his way he'll be a spirit no longer, and who knows how much trouble a corporeal hell-beast with goat horns and a half-dozen eyes can cause.
I will offer a rare word of praise for the use of 3-D in this movie. The effect only kicks in when we see the action through the ancient "spirit photography"-producing VHS camcorder that Ryan stumbles upon in the movie's opening moments. Tobi-the-Cloud has a depth to him; Ryan and company can wade into him and are often slammed back by his violent tantrums. It distracts viewers from the rampant stupidity of virtually every character in the film.
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension isn't a bad movie, exactly, in that it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Audiences will experience the same brand of giddy terror that they have in each of the series' previous entries, the same jump scares generated by the camera stumbling onto a spooky-looking kid with blacked-out eyes, the same creeping dread spawned by dark rooms spied by handheld cameras during the witching hour. But that sameness is the problem: Paranormal Activity's shtick has clearly run its course.