*SPOILER ALERT*
(dir: Guillermo del Toro) Grand Guignol Gothic ghost story by a master of magnificent self-indulgence. Mia Wasikowska plays Edith, our Gothic heroine in hoop-skirts and spectacles, an aspiring novelist who has endured ghostly encounters of her own, whose father is an American tycoon, and who allows herself to be swept off her feet by a romantic but broke English nobleman (Tom Hiddleston). Returning with him to his secluded mansion which he shares with no servants, just an enigmatic, smouldering sister (Jessica Chastain), she finds herself suffering the plight of many a Gothic heroine: that is, isolated, haunted, persecuted, and running around eerie hallways illuminated only by candelabrum and wearing only a nightie.
Fortunately for Edith, she's not in a Le Fanu story, or there'd be morphine hallucinations involved. On the other hand, she does share with the majority of Gothic heroines certain unfortunate traits: a tendency toward hysteria and thick-headed thinking, naievete, and a weird passivity which seems foreign to a modern sensibility. (Why does she keep drinking the tea, which makes her pass out and wake spitting blood?) The one quality she maintains which keeps our interest is an unvanquished curiosity, and this, of course, will save her in the end.
This particular mansion (and, as is traditional in Gothics, the aristocratic family it represents) is mouldering and decayed not just metaphorically, with a vast hole in its roof letting the snow and leaves in and the red clay earth shoving up through cracks in the floor. The ghosts are not whispering suggestions, but hysterical, ridiculously aggressive creatures wearing no skins, just bloody musculatures or spidery underskins blackened by cholera.
I suspect this movie wants to be Coppola's Dracula, with its overbright color scheme (teal and orange to begin with, turning a complete fairy-tale red-white-and-black by the end), but it lacks both the palpable sensuality and the macabre playfulness to do it. What it does share with that absurd but superior effort are inconsistent accents, copious amounts of blood, and a complete and utter shamelessness. (For a hilariously funny exploration of its shamelessness, see the conversation by Nicole and Mallory about it over at the Toast. It's got big spoilers, but don't miss it once you've seen the movie.) Unlike the Coppola film, the historicity here is uninspired, like going to a museum, where the dust-covered details are there but never spring into life. The movie culminates in, I kid you not, a Victorian chick-fight between the black queen and the white queen, wielding butcher knives, cleavers, even snow shovels.
It's too bad. I thought I was going to love this.
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