Crimson Peak

In her best menacing whisper, a maternal ghost keeps warning her young progeny, “Beware of Crimson Peak.” She’s right, although not for the intended reasons.

That’s the title of the latest horror movie from director Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim), a gory Gothic romance with Hitchcockian influences that emphasizes style over substance.

The story takes place in the early 20th century and opens in Buffalo, N.Y., where Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is a promising but reclusive author haunted by a family tragedy. She lives in an upscale house with her stern industrialist father (Jim Beaver), who disapproves when Edith begins flirting with Thomas (Tom Hiddleston), a British inventor who’s visiting town to secure an investment for his latest agricultural gadget. The allure of the foreigner causes Edith to distance herself from Alan (Charlie Hunnam), a childhood friend and doctor.

As their relationship deepens, Edith agrees to visit England and stay with Thomas and his mysterious sister (Jessica Chastain) in a rural mansion on the family farm that, as she later discovers, hides plenty of secrets, not to mention mounds of blood-red clay beneath its floorboards.

Del Toro brings his typical visual flair to the material, with the sumptuous production design supplementing an ominous atmosphere filled with the typical creaky doors, howling winds, flickering lights and candelabras, things that go bump in the night, and a really intimidating old mansion (along with some torrential rainfall). The forbidding apparitions and brutal violence might please genre aficionados.

The filmmaker also continues his fascination with insects and the supernatural, at one point offering a close-up of ants feeding on a dead butterfly in one example of the film’s heavy-handed symbolic indulgences.

However, while the melodramatic screenplay by del Toro and Matthew Robbins (Mimic) hints at deeper issues such as feminism and socioeconomic class amid its period backdrop, the film too often feels stuffy and pretentious like its aristocratic characters. It doesn’t generate much suspense as it builds toward the inevitable climactic twist.

The result is moderately creepy but not scary, more tedious than thrilling, and it seems like a lesser effort from the versatile del Toro. For him, Crimson Peak is hardly a high point.

Rated R, 119 minutes.