Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Mrs. McMichael, Doug Jones, Bruce Gray, Sofia Wells, Javier Botet, Bill Lake, Martin Julien.
The Victorian society, one so noble, one so pretentious and self serving, had no qualms about the dealing with those they saw as lingering within the realms of madness, those they thought were drawn too deeply to the shadowed recesses of the mind as to actually give them many euphemisms and one that has persisted through time is the mad woman in the attic, the woman who is locked away from even her own family for the fear of the dark web that she surrounds herself with.
Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, Crimson Peak, is one that borders so closely to the territory of Gothic masterpiece that its two leading female protagonists completely dominate the proceedings and offer a distinction between the light and the shade that would have had Victorian society chomping at the bit to analysis and the bitter jealousies that are contained within the colourful and flowing narrative.
The film though does not dwell just solely within what is being said, the victim for many a lofty ideal placed forward when broaching the idea of rage and madness, the allusion to the subtle placing of instruments that would become a key factor in the film enough to send the squeamish hiding behind their hands and the destruction, the pleasure in seeking a violent passion almost verging on the damned. The allusion to historically insane serial killers of the female persuasion not lost on the audience and the very real thought of Lizzie Borden, the notorious young woman who dismembered her parents in a fit of rage looms somewhere deep in the recess of the film’s psyche.
Crimson Peak is arguably Jessica Chastain’s defining moment on screen, the intensity she brings to the part of Lucille Sharpe is one that leads the film down the very edge of the gothic interpretation and the way that Guillermo del Toro handles the clues to the disturbing nature of her own personal consciousness is sensitively handled but one that screams brutality and shattered psychosis.
A film that eagerly wants to take the cinema goer’s hand and lead it astray, that asks the audience to fall in love with the characters and which doesn’t disappoint one single bit, a 21st Century Gothic piece of paradise in which to be swept up by.
Ian D. Hall