Crimson Peak (2015)
17 November 2018 01:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeFinally 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.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 12:45 am (UTC)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!