Crimson Peak review – evil springs from a psychosexually rich soil of horror

Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fantasy-romance Crimson Peak is outrageously sumptuous, gruesomely violent and designed to within an inch of its life. Every shot is an intricate, curlicued marvel of detail: there are images which glow from behind like stained glass. I’ve been sceptical about this film-maker’s pictorial sense in the past, even in the widely admired Pan’s Labyrinth from 2006, which called to my mind Tarantino’s shrugging response to a certain kind of film infatuated with its own visuals: “Pretty pictures …” But Crimson Peak has more narrative sinew and black comic style than this.

The title refers to the red soil in a certain sinister landscape. The colour must, however, suggest something else, and this could yet inspire Amy Heckerling to make a Gothic sequel to Clueless called Crimson Wave. There is a tablespoon of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto here, and a bucket of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, as filmed by Hitchcock. Mia Wasikowska has the Joan Fontaine role; Tom Hiddleston is Olivier and Jessica Chastain is a sexified version of Mrs Danvers, gliding proprietorially around a creepy old house, a bunch of keys jingling at the waist.

Wasikowska plays Edith, a beautiful young woman and aspiring novelist in late-19th-century New York, whose father is a self-made industrial millionaire: their family name, in deference to the Hammer tradition, is Cushing. Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain play Sir Thomas Sharpe and his haughty sister Lucille: mad, bad and dangerous to know, the pair of them. They are impecunious young Brit aristocrats, new in town and looking for nouveau riche Americans to inject cash into their crumbling family home and neglected estates in Britain, on which can be found innovative clay-mining machinery of Sir Thomas’s own design.

Lucille is given to preposterous recitals of Chopin at polite gatherings, looking up from the piano like a sated predator; as Sir Thomas, Hiddleston’s sensitive, drawn face can suggest wounded pride and hurt feelings – he has the soul of a misunderstood artist. As ever, Wasikowska is an intelligent, assured presence, and she carries off the Millais-type lustrous hairstyle the movie gives her.

Before long, and in appallingly suspicious circumstances, the charming Sir Thomas marries Edith and brings her home to the unfeasibly scary pile in “Cumberland”, a place which looks as vast as a North American prairie. Edith must somehow make a friend of the glowering Lucille and come to terms with being the chatelaine of this bizarre place. Secrets are revealed: flowers of evil are springing from a psychosexually rich soil of horror.

The violence is shocking: just as in Pan’s Labyrinth, someone gets a grisly wound just below the eye, a particularly horrible idea, and there is also a stomach-turning battering with a blunt object. I have to say, I’m squeamish about Del Toro’s enthusiasm for violence, though it is always exactly judged. I’m less convinced by his Halloweeny ghosts. Hiddleston’s voice is a silky marvel, with something of James Mason, and also Mark Rylance in the 1995 movie version of AS Byatt’s Angels and Insects. Crimson Peak is so addictively watchable and macabre, there’s no doubting Del Toro’s sulphurous showmanship.