Tom Hiddleston and Mia Wasikowska in “Crimson Peak”
My mind still reeling from its collection of bloopers in screenplay and staging, I answered: “It wasn’t that good”.
The bloopers deserve no forgiveness. The writing exhibits a texture of beginning with a denouement to be reached through an assemblage of waypoints that titillate viewers, scare them, make the fate of the heroine uncertain and stimulate our anxiety for her welfare. There are worse ways of creating a screenplay. But even with its gothic horror genealogy, “Crimson Peak” lacks bite.
It begins early last century in Buffalo, NY, where Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is transcribing the manuscript of her newly-written novel on the new-fangled typewriter in the editorial room of her father’s newspaper. Handsome young Tom (Thomas Hiddleston), there to plead for a loan to build the steam-powered excavator to extract miraculous crimson sludge on his family’s derelict Yorkshire estate, walks direct to Edith and immediately praises her writing, without turning even a page of it.
Tom always travels with his older sister Lucille (a raven-haired Jessica Chastain). Newlyweds Tom and Edith arrive at the estate to confront blood, murder, sex and ghoulish apparitions that cleave fairly close to the fiction genre begun by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. But while the film’s imagination values try hard, the padding between the waypoints in the plot runs out of puff too soon to sustain us to the end.
At all cinemas.
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