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Crimson Peak (2015)
Finally got round to watching "Crimson Peak", a film which I remember as having sounded promising before release and then receiving generally dismissive reviews.
It's certainly got some dubious plot-holes (Edith running round on a supposedly broken leg for most of the last act, for one thing; and it's hard to create a convincing vacuum inside a house by shutting the windows tightly when there is snow falling through a hole in the roof! Why does the portrait of Thomas's mother show her as an old woman if Thomas was only twelve when she died? Why would anyone make and save all those cylinder recordings? How can Edith's banker father still have rough hands, when he hasn't been a steelworker for decades?) And the film's idea of northern England has more in common with backwoods Canada than Cumbria, especially the 'post office' which appears to be a log cabin (and allegedly hires out horses).
But it managed to get me emotionally for all that. Especially the "you're a doctor, tell me where" line, which appears to have one heart-wrenching implication and then subsequently turns out to have another...
The film pulls off the trick of making you understand and semi-sympathise with the antagonists after -- even after -- learning what they have done: Lucille with her terror of being shut away alone, Thomas who has been both shielded by her and destroyed by her. (Or maybe it's just the age-old case of Hollywood using 'British' accents with the intention of subliminally signalling effete villainy and triggering subliminal allegiance instead! The wholesome all-American doctor is certainly a cipher.)
A good many aspects of this film are pretty ridiculous, not just in retrospect but while you're actually watching it, alas; a lot of the locations and events seem to be in there with the purpose of looking good rather than of making sense in the context of the surrounding story. The final showdown in particular is all about imagery rather than any kind of common sense (and let's not mention the steam-powered machinery...)
From the spoilers I'd overheard, I'd actually gained the impression that Edith's big discovery is that the siblings and their house already are ghosts, and that she has married into the undead; that might have been a more credible story!
And yet... it does have that emotional kick. The one vital thing is that you should become invested in what becomes of the characters, and I was.
And I like the twist that 'deliberately breaking Edith's heart' turns out to involve telling the aspiring authoress that she clearly doesn't have the faintest idea about writing angst! Nicely balanced later on by the revelations of just how much harm and anguish love can lead to, which is something which at that point she knows nothing about; she is a sheltered innocent and her stories of love's torments almost certainly are rubbish.
It's certainly got some dubious plot-holes (Edith running round on a supposedly broken leg for most of the last act, for one thing; and it's hard to create a convincing vacuum inside a house by shutting the windows tightly when there is snow falling through a hole in the roof! Why does the portrait of Thomas's mother show her as an old woman if Thomas was only twelve when she died? Why would anyone make and save all those cylinder recordings? How can Edith's banker father still have rough hands, when he hasn't been a steelworker for decades?) And the film's idea of northern England has more in common with backwoods Canada than Cumbria, especially the 'post office' which appears to be a log cabin (and allegedly hires out horses).
But it managed to get me emotionally for all that. Especially the "you're a doctor, tell me where" line, which appears to have one heart-wrenching implication and then subsequently turns out to have another...
The film pulls off the trick of making you understand and semi-sympathise with the antagonists after -- even after -- learning what they have done: Lucille with her terror of being shut away alone, Thomas who has been both shielded by her and destroyed by her. (Or maybe it's just the age-old case of Hollywood using 'British' accents with the intention of subliminally signalling effete villainy and triggering subliminal allegiance instead! The wholesome all-American doctor is certainly a cipher.)
A good many aspects of this film are pretty ridiculous, not just in retrospect but while you're actually watching it, alas; a lot of the locations and events seem to be in there with the purpose of looking good rather than of making sense in the context of the surrounding story. The final showdown in particular is all about imagery rather than any kind of common sense (and let's not mention the steam-powered machinery...)
From the spoilers I'd overheard, I'd actually gained the impression that Edith's big discovery is that the siblings and their house already are ghosts, and that she has married into the undead; that might have been a more credible story!
And yet... it does have that emotional kick. The one vital thing is that you should become invested in what becomes of the characters, and I was.
And I like the twist that 'deliberately breaking Edith's heart' turns out to involve telling the aspiring authoress that she clearly doesn't have the faintest idea about writing angst! Nicely balanced later on by the revelations of just how much harm and anguish love can lead to, which is something which at that point she knows nothing about; she is a sheltered innocent and her stories of love's torments almost certainly are rubbish.
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Anyway, I think the big reason why Crimson Peak got lukewarm reviews (and I've noticed that when talking about the movie with some people) is because of how "predictable" it was - and I agree, even if I loved the film. But I kind of see it as intentional, to a certain point, since the film is basically one big homage to the Gothic horror/romance genre. Half way through the movie first time I saw it, I started joking to myself the Sharpe siblings were probably incestuous and boy did it not disappoint... But it's a movie that's all about style over substance, *up to a certain point*, and those types of stories are over the top most of the time. I'll admit, it's what I like about them. I find it way more tolerable than F.F. Coppola's Dracula, but the Sharpe siblings and their "sympathy for the Devil" aspect definitely brings the film to a whole other level.
Sidenote: I did find interesting that Thomas' ghost is the only one who's white, considering all the others are either red or black - which kind of makes me wonder if he got to go to some kind of afterlife since he looks different and he had a redemption by death... and as for Lucille, she ends up living in her own personal hell as a ghost: she's "locked away", trapped in the house, and she's alone.
For the cylinder recordings, they did mention in the film they belonged to one of Thomas' wives before they married, and that she brought the device with her. I always assumed Lucille kept the recordings around on purpose, since she kept things from Thomas' previous wives as creepy memorabilia. I can totally see her listening to them while busying herself with something else (and now I have a hundred weird scenarios in my mind, half of them I'd much rather forget about).
The log cabin made me laugh, not gonna lie. It looked cozy, but it's so typically... well, not British anyway :P Thinking about it, I can't help but see it as a callback to Edith's home and really have it contrast with Allerdale Hall and the snow coming in through the roof...
Before the film was released, considering how much emphasis was put on Allerdale Hall and how it was often repeated in promos that it had a "soul" of its own, my theory was that the house set a curse on his inhabitants and that the Sharpes were enslaved to it, and that Edith would be the next victim that the house would demand - weird scenario, I know. But I liked it. Ah well. :P
(Although, I might write that story one day.)
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Even more of a coincidence is that I very nearly included your headcanons about the de Chagny family as secret supporters of the Comte de Chambord in yesterday's 'collected Raoul' post -- but I left it out on the grounds that it wasn't my headcanon, however much it appealed to me, and that you weren't writing it any more :-(
(Can I invite you to the severely underpopulated
I lost all access to Tumblr a year or so ago when they put in a new verification screen that my browser can't navigate past; it's a pain because there are a couple of useful reference pages that I had linked to. I keep meaning to try to cut and paste the content via an emulator, but have never got round to it.
I gather from the recent
The incest element certainly wasn't obvious in advance to me -- it's entirely normal for someone like Lucille to be incredibly possessive and controlling of her family without actually descending into lust. But as I said, I assumed that the supernatural element was much greater than it proved to be -- one of the criticisms I found in a contemporary review was that the ghosts don't really serve any purpose in the plot. Edith makes her own discoveries and fights her own struggle, and the story could have been written very much the same without any floaty apparitions at all -- they're only there for scares. (And in fact they're undermining their own cause, as it were, by being so hideous: all the ghosts in the plot are actually helpful and well-intentioned, yet they're all horrifying enough to scare their target out of her wits. If Edith's mother wanted to warn her, she would have done better to materialise as a soft whisper in the night than as a blackened and rotting hag clawing at the door-handle-- doubtless she didn't have any choice, but it comes across as gore for gore's sake. Which sums up a lot of the film, really; as you say, style over substance.)
Even Thomas's 'negative' ghost is singularly unattractive compared to his normal presence :-p
(I noticed that the novelization tries to gloss this by saying that the uncanny yellow eyes are the glow of golden sunlight and happiness shining through him, but it's just... weird.)
Unless I completely misunderstood the cylinder recordings, I thought there was supposed to be one for each wife, like the envelopes of evidence that Edith found (presumably carefully compiled by Enola in secret-- Edith isn't the first amateur detective in that house!)
It would make more sense if it was just Enola testing out her new recording device on Thomas, but I thought the woman who gives her name in the first cylinder Edith plays was one of the others...
But apparently, as in the case of "Love Never Dies", a severely flawed canon appeals to me.
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But yeah, I admit that I'm not that much in the Phantom of the Opera fandom - mainly because it kind of quieted down for several reasons (Hamilton, Broadway casting, the 25th anniversary's popularity dying down). But you're more than welcomed to use the Comte de Chambord headcanon - I'm of the opinion that headcanons should be shared, so I absolutely do not mind :) And well, I'm just not as inspired as I used to be a few years ago, and it's better to leave it for a while and come back to it with a fresher mind than beating up a dead horse. I'm still up for talking about it, though.
I admit I thought of the incest explanation more as a really bad joke to myself than anything else - so I was surprised and at the same time not when I saw it was real :P
I'm not surprised the ghosts are there just to look "horrifying but cool", though, knowing Guillermo del Toro's work. He's fascinated by the macabre, so that the ghosts are hideous but passively benevolent is 100% his style.
The cylinder recordings all came from one wife whose name I can't remember - and the letters were all Enola's, who is another wife who didn't use the recordings at all. At least that's what I understood :P I'm not sure whether it's the previous wives who compiled it all, or if Lucille kept everything and almost "wanted" Edith to find out - but it'd already be too late.
And I joined the vicomte de Chagny group. :)
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I did rather gather that you had moved into other fandoms :-p
But then you seemed to have stopped writing altogether... and I never did watch the "Star Wars" sequel, or the stand-alone "Rogue One", so I was still busy avoiding spoilers.
I don't know enough about 19th century French politics to start including crypto-royalist conspiracies into my fiction, I'm afraid (which is to say I've never read any novels dealing with the subject: most of my history and geography comes from stories!)-- that's what's refreshing about coming across the occasional story where you get the feeling that the author is actually aware of a wider world out there, rather than putting her own life-view into a poor carbon-copy of all her favourite fanfiction clichés of what 'The Past' was like. (Servants, corsets and horses all tend to be deeply unbelievable...)
I rewatched the middle of the film with much greater attention and foreknowledge (and with the subtitles switched on,so I could see precisely who was supposedly saying what!), having already had to rewatch the end for Alan's story and the beginning for Thomas's ;-p
And I can confirm that I did get the details of Edith's discoveries right from my memories: she discovers three envelopes in Enola's trunk, all labelled in the same handwriting (I assumed it to be Enola's, but it would be a nasty twist if it were, in fact, Lucille's -- but then why would she hide all three amongst the possessions of the latest wife, instead of in the relevant cases?), plus a wax cylinder player to match the cylinders she has already found.
When Edith listens to the recordings, the first speaker introduces herself as Pamela Upton, who has apparently just acquired the device and is testing it with her beloved husband (I also checked the dates on Pamela's briefly-glimpsed marriage certificate: she was thirty-four, he was twenty!) Then the speaker on the second recording Edith tries says that she is being poisoned and is going to hide the cylinders as evidence -- it hadn't occurred to me that this might also be Pamela with a voice changed and hoarse from coughing, but in fact it clearly isn't, because she goes on to talk about not wanting to die so very far from home and wanting her body taken back. (And the subtitles prove this by stating clearly that it *is* Enola speaking.)
I'm guessing that Enola also assembled and hid the envelopes as evidence, although it might have made more sense to leave the machine to play the recordings together with the cylinders :-p
We don't find out what the other recordings contained, as Edith understandably bolts at this point. (Fanfic possibilities? ;-) I assume by analogy they were recordings of the other wives, but maybe they weren't; maybe they were all Pamela's, and Enola simply discovered the machine and added her own testimony at the end. That would be marginally more plausible... although, as you said, Lucille does keep mementoes of her victims, and she might have deliberately got each new wife to record her voice together with Thomas 'for posterity'.
Probably not, because she makes no attempt to record Edith, while she does take her hair. But then maybe she didn't know where the blank cylinders had got to :-p
Somebody obviously did keep the photos from each marriage (and Margaret's marriage certificate). Obviously they would have had to have been cleared out of sight before a new wife was brought in, and from the way Lucille reacts when she realises Edith has found and opened Enola's trunk it's possible that it was she who put them in there... Either that, or she simply realises that the existence of a prior wife whom nobody ever mentioned and whose possessions have been thrown in the cellar is in itself going to look highly suspicious!
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