Crimson Peak movie cast and film- reviewed by Chris Stuckmann

Full-text transcript of the Crimson movie (2015) review:

[00:00:04] Crimson Peak is directed by Guillermo Del Toro and stars Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain and Charlie Hunnam and is a horror romance of sorts and very similar to the village in regards to a genre that was a movie that was marketed very heavily as a horror film, but in reality is more of a romance in disguise. And Crimson Peak is very much like that as well. This tells a story of a young, aspiring writer who falls in love with the man who’s helping her critique her writings. And they eventually get married and move into this very dilapidated and disgusting old house that needs a ton of work. And just as you might expect, no one really gets any sleep at this house because the nighttime is generally filled with ghosts and ghouls creeping through the halls. When it comes to Del Toro’s movies, all of them look incredible. He has immaculate set design, production design, costume design. The cinematography is always very beautiful. The movies he directs all look amazing. And Crimson Peak is one of the best looking films he’s directed. It’s by far my favorite aspect of this movie. This is a gorgeous looking movie. Also excellent are the four central performances. I thought everyone was really good in this movie, but the standout is by far Tom Hiddleston. He’s by far the most interesting character in the movie. He has the most compelling backstory as well. And he was great, great, great in this film.

[00:01:15] However, overall, I was disappointed with Crimson Peak, and largely that’s because of something that Del Toro has been doing as of late, making really beautiful movies that look incredible, that have virtually no substance. One of the most glaring problems that I had with Crimson Peak is that our main hero has virtually no arc. She starts in one place and at the end of the film she is basically in the same place, if not a worse place, hasn’t learned much of anything, and there isn’t really anything special about her character. At least half of this movie is her waking up in the middle of the night, hearing a noise in the hallway, slowly walking through the hallway while holding a candle while some CGI thing eventually pops out at her. This scene occurs consecutively about four times. And you get to the point where you’re wondering, is this movie really going anywhere? Are we going to get to anything besides her just creeping through the hallways and hearing strange stuff at night? The first act of the movie is really about her getting to know Tom Hiddleston and their romance that develops. And once they eventually decide to go somewhere with that, almost the entire rest of the movie is simply what I just said. Her hearing strange noises wandering through the halls and then finding what Minority Report called an orgy of evidence.

[00:02:21] If you’ve seen Minority Report, which, by the way, I’ve just reviewed in my Steven Spielberg series, there’s a scene where Colin Farrell finds pictures all over the ground and he says this is an orgy of evidence. Do you know how many orgies I had when I was a cop? None, because it was the most exaggerated pile of here’s everything that implicates this person in this crime that no one ever finds ever, because it’s just too good to be true. And without spoiling anything, our hero has this moment in the movie in which she finds just this pile of evidence that just tells her everything you need to know. And it’s this long, drawn out exposition scene in which information is just fed to us that we don’t really need that we could figure out on our own. And I’m on a huge tangent here, but this is a storytelling trope that I’ve seen in movies lately that is really bothering me. It’s an extremely lazy writing tactic. It’s a way to tell the audience information without being clever enough to find ways to do it through visual storytelling, which would have made it so much more fulfilling as an audience member watching this movie instead of just having everything listed to us. The other issue I have with this movie is that the dialogue simply did not interest me at all. There’s a scene in which our hero has just seen ghosts walking through the halls and she’s terrified, she’s crying.

[00:03:31] And Tom Hiddleston walks up to him, goes, don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll go to the post office. Oh, yes, the mystical post office that cures all our ills. All of that being said, the last fifteen minutes of this movie are great. They’re what I wanted the whole movie to be like. The last fifteen minutes are intense and exciting and gory. And I was like, wow, this is what a Crimson Peak should have been like. The last fifteen minutes are fantastic, but the entire rest of the film feels like it’s leading to something that finally happens in that last ten minutes. But I could never see myself watching the beginning of this movie again. So unfortunately Crimson Peak disappointed me. It is yet another Del Toro movie that looks magnificent, that simply doesn’t have much substance to it. Go out and watch Pan’s Labyrinth. That would be my recommendation to you or the first two Hellboy movies. Those are by far his best films, in my opinion. I’m going to give Crimson Peak a C, guys, thank you so much, as always, for watching. I’m going to have reviews for Goosebumps as well as Bridge of Spies coming out in a couple of days. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Once again and as always, if you like this, you can click right here and get stuck, ionised.