Crimson Peak Review - A Sleepy Gothic Horror from the mind of Guillermo Del Toro

I have a confession to make: this is the movie that kicked off my I Love Horror challenge, and it took me a decade to get here. Crimson Peak came out in 2015, and I missed it entirely, because at the time I was still nursing a self-imposed horror ban after Eli Roth's Hostel left me traumatized in a way I clearly hadn't recovered from. It took a full-blown challenge, and a genuine love for Guillermo del Toro, to finally get me into this house.

Directed by del Toro, whose Pan's Labyrinth sits comfortably in my top 100 films of all time, Crimson Peak follows Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring writer with a taste for ghost stories, who falls for Sir Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston), a charming but cash-strapped baronet trying to secure investors to unearth the red clay beneath his crumbling family estate. Edith marries him, leaves her father and her other suitor, Dr. McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), behind, and moves into Allerdale Hall: a house that is, quite literally, falling apart at the seams, and quite literally bleeding red clay through the floorboards whenever it snows.

There's some debate about whether Crimson Peak even qualifies as horror rather than pure Gothic romance, and I understand the instinct, but I'd push back on it. Gothic can stand as its own genre, sure, but horror has always been a wide umbrella: slashers, possession films, supernatural sci-fi, and yes, Gothic romance all live under it. This is horror. It's just horror wearing a corset.

What makes the film work, at least emotionally, is the slow accumulation of dread around the house itself and the people in it. Thomas's sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), is unnerving from the moment she's introduced, and Edith is repeatedly warned, by her mother's ghost as a child, and later by the house itself, that something here is not safe. That warning eventually resolves into the film's real reveal: Thomas and Lucille have been locked in an incestuous relationship for years, and the women who came before Edith haven't simply disappeared. They've been taken care of, in the way this house takes care of things.

That's where my biggest critique lives. The film is at its most effective when it lets the tension between Edith and Lucille breathe, but we don't get nearly enough of it. The two women share the screen only a handful of times across the entire runtime, and the dread that should be constant, this low hum of something is deeply wrong with this woman, gets diluted by scenes that sit in flat, uneventful daylight. Del Toro is clearly more interested in atmosphere than momentum, and while I understand that choice on a thematic level, I think the film needed Lucille's presence to feel inescapable in order to really land its horror, rather than saving nearly all of that tension for the third act.

Visually, though, this is a stunning film, and it's easy to see why del Toro keeps returning to this Gothic well. The red-and-white color work  (blood against snow, clay against porcelain skin) is doing real thematic work, and I found myself wishing he'd leaned into that contrast even harder than he already does.

The ending gave me some genuine conflict. Edith survives, but she still gives Thomas one last lingering, tender look before it's over, and I couldn't help but sit with that. He loved her, sure...but he was also actively married to and involved with his own sister the entire time. That's a lot of grace to extend a man in that particular position.

And that, honestly, is where the film opens up into something worth talking about beyond its own plot. Incest as a plot device shows up constantly in film and television, but it's worth noticing how differently it tends to be handled depending on who's telling the story. In stories centering white characters, it so often gets romanticized, softened, played as tragic and doomed rather than monstrous. Think The Vampire Lestat, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragons. In stories centering people of color, it's a clear distinction that incest is abusive, full stop. Crimson Peak isn't uniquely guilty of this, but it's a clean example of the pattern, and it's one worth sitting with.

Now, for anyone following the challenge, you can use the bingo cards I've made to help you analyze the film. This one was a clean sweep: forbidden love, a cemetery scene, a love triangle stacked into something closer to a love square, an orphaned heroine, an isolating setting miles from anyone who could hear you scream, a dilapidated house, a deadly love interest, a marriage complicated by an entirely different marriage, a ghostly reunion at the very end, and a genuinely great bloody-gown sequence. I don't hand out bingo lightly.

Overall, Crimson Peak is a gorgeous, patient Gothic tale that earns its atmosphere even when it doesn't fully earn its pacing. It's not scary in the traditional sense, but it lingers — much like its ghosts do.

I give Crimson Peak 2.5 ⭐

Up next in the challenge: Sleepy Hollow. Let me know your thoughts on Crimson Peak in the comments, and I'll see you there.

You can find information about the challenge here: https://youtu.be/TlriExyI-iE. You can also download the challenge posters and bingo cards here: https://canva.link/hedw35vdea86ozy and https://canva.link/n3yw9kc6chxarzk

Shaquanna "Quanna" Stevens is a film critic, educator, and storyteller who reviews films through the lens of culture, representation, and genre. She runs Her Reel Review, where she explores horror, romance, fantasy, and films by Black creators. When she's not writing or filming reviews, she teaches English IV Honors and AP Literature, advises student filmmakers, and helps young creatives develop their voices.