Crimson peak is a story about a young woman fleeing from the tragedy that befell her family until love makes her fall for a stranger where she begins to uncover hidden truth about all that has happened.
All the carefully orchestrated color schemes and all the dark corridors and secret chambers and all the flowing red metaphors in the world can't accelerate the slow patches, or make us care about lead characters.
SFist
March 23, 2017
Crimson Peak wants to be a lot of things, and it doesn't succeed at all of them. But when it does succeed it is so bewitching that its faults can be excused.
Del Toro builds a tight plot but never develops it; his frames are overdecorated with macabre clutter and smothered in shadow, but the atmosphere of dread never reaches ecstatic excesses.
To absorb the extraordinary details, colors, shapes and situations that are rife with layered danger is to witness this director's fierce commitment to his own vision.
Even though it has visual beauty that makes it required viewing on the big screen, I can't endorse Crimson Peak or claim it is anything more significant than a disappointment.
What [Guillermo] del Toro had in mind when shooting Crimson Peak was probably a stylish gothic period piece in the same acclaimed lane as Pan's Labyrinth. Unfortunately, Crimson Peak fails to work on that level.
Crimson Peak is an effort to make a throwback movie with modern effects and modern sex scenes, but it can't contend with the modern gaze with which we're looking at it.
