Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A visually captivating Gothic costume romance story, that never excites as much as it indulges the senses with a creepiness. Writer-director Guillermo del Toro(“Pacific Rim”/”Trollhunters”/”Beast”) keeps it overblown with a no substance narrative, but is stylishly pleasing with a menacing atmosphere. It plays out as an unhinged horror/ghost story tacked onto a familiar melodrama tale. Co-writers with Toro are Matthew Robbins/Lucinda Coxon, who might have been better off shooting for camp than playing this one out as a bitchy horror pic ride to torment a lonely bride who sees a ghost.

Smoothy British baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his slippery sister Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain) have arrived in Buffalo, NY, at the turn of the 20th century, to sell his invention of a “clay harvester,” a mining machine, to a rich widowed industrialist. The handsome con artist meets Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), the vulnerable virgin daughter to the wealthy widowed industrialist Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver). The wannabe Mary Shelley is trying to publish her supernatural romance novel. After Edith’s father’s untimely demise, Thomas manages to convince Edith to join him in his gloomy crumbling English haunted castle, at Crimson Peak, he shares with his diabolical sister.