![]() ![]() ![]() This is Allerdale Hall, a latterday House of Usher full of “shadows, creaks and groans”, with blue-green walls, locked rooms and forbidden basements (“ never go below this level”). Cushing is unimpressed, but Edith is wooed by Sharpe, who sees beauty in her eerie fiction (“the ghosts are just a metaphor”) and sweeps her from the electrified modernity of New York to the ancient stones of his crumbling Lake District pile. Mia Wasikowska is Edith Cushing, daughter of Buffalo, NY industrial pioneer Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver), from whom rakish baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) seeks investment for his revolutionary mining machine. In many ways, this marks a return to the Mexican writer/director’s roots, the memory of Federico Luppi in Cronos licking fresh nosebleed from a pristine lavatory floor evoked in bloody washroom showdowns and orgasmic arterial spurts. We open in the turn-of-the-century US and progress to a misty UK, but there’s more in common with del Toro’s Spanish-language productions ( Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone) than such English-speaking hits as Hellboy or Pacific Rim. Yet the narrative itself is torn more upon the horns of the Brontë sisters and Edgar Allan Poe, with a vivid splash of Sheridan Le Fanu. ![]()
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