Horror

Crimson Peak: A Haunted House, Bleeding and Beautiful

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska enters a haunted house in Guillermo del Toro's "Crimson Peak"

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a frivolous, ravishing movie that invites a referendum on the very pleasures of moviegoing. This frustrating and satisfying film, which del Toro directed from a script he wrote with Matthew Robbins, is destined to divide audiences, not because it will elicit disputes over its quality, but because appreciation of it hinges entirely on the vagaries of subjective taste. Narrative purists who prioritize plotting and screenwriting above all else will doubtless be vexed by the clumsiness of its dialogue and the banality of its story. Formalists, however, will take rapture in its splendorous visuals and in the lush refinement of del Toro’s craft. It is, in binary terms, either a terrible good movie or a magnificent bad movie.

Let’s begin with the bad. From a storytelling standpoint, Crimson Peak is disappointingly rote, if not entirely dull. Set aside its fantastical prologue—in which a child is visited by the ghost of her newly dead mother, a black phantasm with spindly fingers who whispers gravely, “Beware of Crimson Peak”—and you might mistake it for a lavish period costume drama (if admittedly the first costume drama ever to take place in Buffalo). The year is 1891, and the object of attraction is the amusingly named Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska, persuasive as ever), the peculiar daughter of a pompous aristocrat, Carter (Deadwood‘s Jim Beaver). Edith is a bit like Cinderella without the wicked stepsiblings; she is mocked by the gentry for her oddness, even though she does draw the admiration of a handsome doctor (Charlie Hunnam, who headlined del Toro’s Pacific Rim). A classic Jane Austen heroine, Edith is unlucky in love but spirited in life, and she brazenly channels her energy into the masculine pursuit of fiction writing. Read More

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The Visit: Nice to Meet You, Grandma. Could You Put Down the Knife?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Grandma goes crazy in M. Night Shyamalan's "The Visit"

The Visit, a chintzy tale of low-budget horror, is the best movie M. Night Shyamalan has made in over a decade. This, of course, is hardly extravagant praise. But while Shyamalan, the cinematic-wunderkind-turned-critical-punching-bag, has helmed his share of recent misfires, those failings suffered less from a lack of artistic talent than a poor sense of scale. Certainly, his recent output—Lady in the Water, The Happening, After Earth—could charitably be deemed “not good”, but all three of those films had their minor virtues, particularly their director’s gift for nifty camerawork and provocative imagery. (Even the misbegotten Last Airbender had one good scene.) The problem was that Shyamalan didn’t want these movies to be good; he wanted them to be great, to be revolutionary, to capture the zeitgeist. Sadly, his clumsy storytelling dashed those hopes, and when you added his ham-fisted dialogue into the mix, the laughable writing masked the visual artistry. Shyamalan’s recent films didn’t fall short of greatness so much as they fell off a cliff.

The Visit is not a great movie (not even close), but the key to its relative success is that it doesn’t want to be great. This is a slender, modestly mounted fright flick—sometimes scary, sometimes funny, frequently ridiculous—and its lack of ambition frees it from the shackles of grandiosity. That in turn gives Shyamalan greater freedom to flex his filmmaking muscle, which he does with aplomb, repeatedly delivering memorable set pieces and exquisite framing. He’s always been good at that stuff, but here he hasn’t weighed himself down with a ponderous storyline, making this the first time he’s ever seemed relaxed. Read More

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It Follows: Getting Off to Pass It On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Maika Monroe is stalked by Death in "It Follows"

It is so easy to make a bad horror movie, and so hard to make a good one. Any filmmaker can momentarily shock audiences with a monster bursting from the closet or a killer slashing from the shadows. But It Follows, David Robert Mitchell’s tense, terrifying second feature, is a master class in horror precisely because of what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t simply rely on a familiar pattern of “Boo!” moments, punctuating moments of dark silence with sudden screams. Instead, it develops a sustained, unrelenting sense of dread, building on its clever premise in smart and tantalizing ways. It chokes you with fear, but it never cheats.

It also serves as a showcase for Mitchell’s undeniable craft. His formal command is evident right from the film’s killer opening sequence, in which a teenage girl, Annie (Bailey Spry), bursts from her house in the twilight hours, wearing heels and looking panicked. She stumbles along the street as her neighbors inquire concernedly, and Mitchell’s camera begins a slow 360-degree turn, eventually relocating Annie as she hightails it in her car, with the soundtrack (by electronica outfit Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland) blaring synths ominously. The following morning, Annie is lying dead on the beach, her bloodied body mangled at an awkward angle, and it’s clear that death is stalking this nondescript Detroit suburb. Read More

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