3.5 stars (out of 5)
‘Visionary’ co-writer/co-producer/director Guillermo del Toro’s latest (after Pacific Rim, and somehow scheduled in between his duties on TV’s The Strain) is a return to the ghost story, although this is less political and more wild and perverse than his The Devil’s Backbone (which seems to be referenced here as fearsome apparitions have ectoplasmic blood that seeps upward).
Mia Wasikowska is Edith Cushing (get it?), a young woman who’s seen ghosts her whole life and wants to get into writing supernatural fiction, and she lives with her rich, domineering Dad Carter (Jim Beaver) in Buffalo, New York, somewhere in the 19th Century. When she meets mysterious and swoony English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who comes sniffing around for money to invest in a mining operation, she soon falls for him, which isn’t surprising as he’s so intense and brooding (and he looks like Tom Hiddleston).
Soon Carter is out of the way, Edith and Thomas are married, and the pair of them have relocated to Cumberland and Allerdale Hall, the family home of Thomas and his creepy sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain, star of the del Toro-produced Mama). And Allerdale turns out to be an only-in-the-movies FX mansion with rotting roofs and floorboards, an elevator that Edith is instructed not to take to the level below, an abundance of ochre that somehow turns everything red, and shrieking phantoms that float, crawl, grin and provide some pretty juicy scares.
del Toro ticks all the ghosty boxes here, as there are nods to Gothic horror, The Haunting (or at least the original), classic Universal shockers, The Woman In Black (the wax cylinders) and maybe even HP Lovecraft’s unnamable terrors, and his players look fabulous in elaborate costumes against sumptuously coloured backdrops. And yes, it probably isn’t up to his greatest pics (The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth), but it should still prove a wonderfully creepy (and kinky) good time for fans of the freaky form.
I Wake Up Screening 