Crimson Peak - 2015

I liked it. In a strange way. It was well done in all its aspects, only the ghosts puzzled me, in the way that they were not scary in the least. Were they supposed to be? They’d been more scary had they been more ghost-like and less corpse-like, I thought they were grotesque, not scary. 
On the other hand, Jessica Chastain was. Her Lucille was the scary part, the mansion was the atmosphere, Tom Hiddlestone’s Thomas provided the charm, Mia Wasikowska’s Edith the innocence. 
One thing I totally disliked, just one: the cheap trick of the murder: they didn’t show the face of the murderer to make us believe that it was Thomas, only to reveal at the end that it was Lucille... but it wasn’t really a surprise, actually it was the only explanation, and a cheap one. We saw only the back of the murderer but it had Thomas clothes and hair... so it’s only annoying when they show us that it was her, not surprising or thrilling or scary, merely annoying, and the scene becomes upsetting in its stupidity. It would have been much better had they not shown the murderer at all, leaving it all to the imagination, that way we would have thought of him and been surprised by the revelation. Why did they fall for such a stupid, senseless deception? 
Moving on: 
I think it was well done, and the house and the red clay in the white snow  were very cool and perfect, and Thomas had exactly the right air about him: he was broken, confused, a child dreaming of a future he knows he can’t have, slave of his past. 
Edith was a spoiled but good girl, only child of a rich man. Her mother died when she was young and came to her as a ghost, warning her to stay away from Crimson Peak, but the poor child had no idea what that meant, and was scared to death by the ghost because, as I said, in this movie all ghosts look grotesquely like rotten corpses with some black or red smoke floating around them. 
When she grows up, Edith wants to be a writer, but nobody takes her seriously, maybe because she’s a woman, or maybe because she’s a woman who wants to write ghost-stories instead of love-stories, or maybe simply because she’s not the good writer she thinks she is, who knows. What we know is that Thomas wins her over the first time they met when he tells her how good a writer she is - after having looked at her manuscript for a second, what an expert critic...
Her father barely knows him but doesn’t like him, without knowing why he sensed something off. 
Thomas courts Edith by asking her to dance at a party, and his sister Lucille looks at them with jealousy and dislike that feels very off, the first time you see it. 
When her father finds out things about Thomas past, he bribes brother and sister with a generous check on condition that they leave immediately after he breaks Edith’s heart. 
It’s obvious that he’ll end up dead, you know that since you hear Thomas ask him if Edith knows about it, about the secret... she doesn’t yet, and she can’t know, so he’ll have to be taken out of the picture. As I said above, it’s not a good scene: they show you a figure very much like Thomas, with the same hair, and dressed like him, but they never showed his face, and the whole thing felt utterly wrong. 
The “break her heart” scene on the other hand was very good. Mr Cushing ordering Thomas to break his daughter’s heart for good, and then he going to dinner and stating publicly that he’ll be going back home with his sister was simply the appetizer; Edith runs out, he goes after her, tells her that there’s nothing holding him here, but it doesn’t seem enough so he hits her where it hurts, he destroys her writing, raising his voice, telling her she writes about feelings she knows nothing about because she’s nothing more than a spoiled child... let’s face it, everything he says is true... and it is a great scene, I loved it, he was very good. 
That night Mr Cushing is murdered, but she doesn’t know it yet when she receives a letter from Thomas ‘explaining’ the bribe and what he had to do (but of course he lies, saying that her father objected to his poverty); she runs to his hotel and learns that he’s gone already, but nobody is surprised to see him standing outside the door, ready to definitely win her over with words of love.
When she learns about her father’s death, as devastated as she is still there’s nothing more to hold her here so she marries him and goes to his house, in England I think, to Allerdale Hall. The mansion was once very grand but is now falling apart: as they enter there’s even a broken roof that lets the rain in - later will be snow, a circle of snow at the centre, very effective. The house is amazing, beautiful and horrible at the same time, with the red clay that looks like blood and stains the bottom of her dresses as she walks along..
Once there, Edith sees strange ghosts of women; also, Thomas and Edith never make love, she always wakes up during the night to find her bed Thomas-less. The one time they had ‘a moment’ that promised passion Lucille showed up uninvited with some tea, that only Edith drank. 
Because of the ghosts, Edith finds out strange things here and there in the house, and slowly learns more than she hoped to find. Thomas had three wives already, all dead, and they all were poisoned and killed after giving to him and Lucille their inheritance - she even receives a letter from Italy, intended for the last of Thomas wives, Enola from Milan; Enola? Not an Italian name, but the letter was beautifully written in Italian :-)
One night a ghost, that she now calls by her name Enola, points her in the direction of where she can find out what is going on in that house: she finds Thomas and Lucille together, and understands they are lovers and have been the whole time. Lucille tells her that they are indeed brother and sister right before pushing her off the staircase to the floor.
Meanwhile in America her childhood friend Alan is investigating, and discovers a lot of things. He leaves for England too, to go get her and bring her back. He arrives right after she fell down, so they let him cure her. As soon as she comes to, he tells her that he’s come to take her away. He has found out everything about the Sharpes: she started the incest when she was like 14, and when their mother found out about it Lucille killed her with a meat hatchet on the head and she was sent to a mental institution. We know that she’s always had power over Thomas, he grew up under her control, and he just can’t leave her.
Lucille tells Thomas that this time he’ll have to kill him (clearly meaning that the last time he didn’t). Still, it’s Lucille that stabs him the first time while Alan is trying to take Edith away, then she gives the knife to Thomas and we have another great scene, when Alan is trying to go away but Thomas comes near him and tells him “if I don’t do it , she will”, and then looks at him and adds “you’re a doctor, tell me where”. Alan is the smart one in this movie, and he can see in Thomas pleading eyes that he doesn’t want to kill him, and that his only chance of surviving is to let him stab him in a non lethal way, so Alan leads Thomas hand to his side, and Thomas stabs him, satisfying Lucille. 
There’s no need for pretending anymore, so Lucille forces Edith to signs the document leaving all her money to them; Edith signs it but then she uses the pen to stab Lucille. Thomas runs to her telling her that Alan is alive and that he loves her and wants to help them get away. When Thomas goes to Lucille to burn the signed document, and admits that he has fallen in love with Edith, Lucille stabs him out of jealousy, twice in the chest and once in the face - another gruesome scene but with very little blood, my stomach was never upset in this movie: again, it was more grotesque than scary.
Lucille loses it completely after killing Thomas, and she goes after Edith to kill her. Edith defends herself with a knife, then runs out of the house in her white dressing gown, and outside the landscape is all white, but stained by the red clay.. again quite effective. 
Lucille is all ‘I won’t stop until I kill you or you kill me’, and they fight, and then Edith says ‘help me’, and to Lucille she says to look at him, behind her. Lucille turns around, and it wasn’t a trick, Thomas is really behind her, the ghost of Thomas that is, and now Edith has the chance to hit her and she does: twice, with a shovel. Edith walks near Thomas and touches his ghost-face before he vanishes. Now alone, Edith and Alan make their way out of the property, and we see the townsfolks  coming to meet them, because Alan had told them to. So you know they’ll be rescued, and we hear Edith’s voice narrating how ghosts are real, and are sometimes trapped somewhere, and we see Lucille’s ghost at the piano that she loved to play, alone now that Thomas is gone. During the credits, we also see a book called Crimson Peak, by Edith Cushing, so she wrote a book about her adventure, and it was probably successful enough that it got printed, and she used her maiden name. 
The end. 

p.s. let me compliment them on the fact that it is a gothic love story and yet there are no cheap sex-scenes, we only see a leg of Edith and a glimpse of Thomas butt and that's it, and the only two scenes involving sex in some way are actually important to the movie, the way they are, and not useless additions to raise curiosity as is often the case. 
I love Tom Hiddlestone and I liked him here, I love his voice and I liked how he could be charming one moment and scary the next one, and fragile with Lucille...

Mia Wasikowska was a very good choice too, but Jessica Chastain was a brilliant one. She plays it so well you start fearing Lucille before even knowing who she is, as you see her at the ball. She did a great job here; never mind the ghosts, the scary presence in that house was her!