Universal PicturesTom Hiddleston brings his hotness and English charm to Crimson Peak, Guillermo Del Toro's new Gothic horror film.
And the movie features double the hotness and English charm: Sons of Anarchy alum Charlie Hunnam, who Del Toro directed in Pacific Rim, also stars.
The movie is set in the 19th century. The 34-year-old actor, best known for playing Loki in The Avengers and the Thor films, portrays Sir Thomas Sharpe, a handsome British aristocrat who marries an American heiress named Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska, and brings her into his home to live with him. His very creepy home. Which may or may not be haunted.
Jessica Chastain plays his sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe. Hunnam portrays Dr. Alan McMichael, who's in love with Cushing.
Crimson Peak is set for release on Friday, Oct. 16, and is rated R for bloody violence, some sexual content and brief strong language. Oh, yeah, and Hiddleston shows his naked butt.
Find out what five critics said about the movie.
1. The A.V. Club's Katie Rife gives Crimson Peak a score of B-, calling the movie "gorgeous, tragic, and not very scary."
"Chastain's performance—icy-cold, unblinking, and perpetually teetering on the edge of deranged—is a highlight," she says. "The other leads can't match Chastain's intensity, however, even though Del Toro and co-writer Matthew Robbins give Wasikowska plenty to do by inverting the damsel-in-distress trope. (Hiddleston, who tellingly flashes the film's only nudity, mostly serves as a plot device.)"
2. Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson says, "only Jessica Chastain lives up to expectations in Crimson Peak" and adds that the movie "comes filled with potential that is never realized, never satisfied."
"The film is not quite as silly as Pacific Rim or his dreadful FX series, The Strain, but as del Toro does too often, here he takes what could be a winning homage to a genre he loves and smothers it in sensational, empty style," he writes. "Crimson Peak features a few killer scenes—my favorite involving a shovel; you'll know it when you see it—and, in its beginnings, successfully conjures up a sense of wispy ghost-movie dread. But before too long, it sadly proves as insubstantial as any common phantasm."
3. Nerdist's Scott Weinberg gives Crimson Peak "five ghostly burritos out of five" and says the movie is "packed to the creaking rafters with stuff that longtime (dare I say 'older'?) horror fans will absolutely love."
"Not only are the three leads pitch-perfect in their emulation of archetypal Gothic characters, but the art direction, production design, and cinematography employed here are nothing short of staggering," he says.
4. Screencrush's Matt Singer gives the film a score of 5 out of 10.
"The people in Crimson Peak feel like they're onscreen purely out of necessity; del Toro needs somebody to creep around his spooky hallways and wear his sumptuous period clothes," he writes. "If any of the people in Crimson Peak were even half as fleshed out as their incredibly ornate world, the film would be a masterpiece."
5. IGN.com's Scott Collura gives Crimson Peak a score of 8.5 out of 10.
"Crimson Peak plays by its own rules, or by Guillermo del Toro's rules anyway," he says. "Featuring memorable performances, amazing production design, and a hard edge that is too often lacking in horror films these days, it nonetheless also manages to subvert some long-standing tropes about the Gothic romance genre which inspired it."