I must take my hat off to Guillermo del Toro. On account of a single film, Pan’s Labyrinth , and its apotheosis reception, the Mexican filmmaker made it to Hollywood and do what they want – which is not necessarily what studios want: the rant Godzilla-meets-Transformers retro-futuristic gloriously Pacific Rim , assumed tribute to masters such as Ray Harryhausen, was far from the blockbuster than many expected. Now Del Toro shoots up to Thriller gothic, sort of Rebecca-vs-Half-Light if it were Mario Bava and Dario Argento behind the camera.
As always in Mexican has everything to do with the stories we tell and how they help us make sense of the world around us, heroine of the Crimson Peak, called Edith (as Wharton) and Cushing (as Peter), is an aspiring writer in New York in the late nineteenth century, and is composing a ghost story – before seeing itself involved in, to fall madly in love with an English baronet, dapper but without a bucket of warm spit, seeking funding to reopen the family’s clay mines. And all in Crimson Peak wheel precisely around the story: if we are not in the fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth , also here we have an innocent forced to a suffering path through a maze of lies and secrets before finding their own identity and their happiness.
It is a millimeter film and detail built by Del Toro, from the detail of clues thrown by the script to the patience with which it all plays out and thrift in use of visual effects: yes, there will be blood, which the Mexican never refrained from doing running on your movies, but here used to serve the impossible and insane love that is at the heart of the intrigue. The blood here serves the same purpose, purification, exorcism, expiation, the great designers of the giallo crystallized; and the way Dan Laustsen photography and Tom Sanders scenarios propose a Baroque symbolism lust deliberately oppressive, with the primary red tones of white, black dominating the image, put Crimson Peak in the line of perverse romanticism of the great classics of Hammer.
Del Toro thus continuing its search for a lost innocence, a large popular cinema lost in time, as if it were still possible to recover it in these more cynical and hurried times. Not sure what the can, because everything in Crimson Peak is clearly derivative and recycled, functioning more as a tribute than as an update. But the gesture is sincere and respectful, respectful and intelligent, and that’s enough to win us.
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