When Amicus Productions released The House That Dripped Blood in 1971, it hardly capitalised on the lurid promise of the title. It must have stuck with Guillermo del Toro, however: he has beautifully literalised the image in Crimson Peak (Universal, 15), a sweeping, swollen haunted house horror in which bricks and mortar become flesh and bone, veritably streaming with the ketchup-coloured residue of dead residents. Allerdale Hall, the crumbling Cumbrian mansion owned by dashing but damaged inventor Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) and his emotionally corseted sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), is like Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley turned inside out; the ghosted gothic love story it houses, too, plays like a disarranged Rebecca, its most intense surges of feeling gushing from unexpected trapdoors.
To unpick the Hall’s unhappy history, of course, there must be an ingenuous outsider. Enter aspiring American writer Edith, wonderfully played by Mia Wasikowska as a kind of flickering human candelabra amid the film’s necessarily purple excesses: the possibly doomed declarations of devotion between lovers, the bloodied ectoplasm trailed by the mansion’s phantoms, the tightly wound veins popping against the deathly complexion of Chastain’s deliciously kinked-out Mrs Danvers figure. Del Toro and his inspired design team know not the meaning of “too much” – even the ballooned sleeves of Kate Hawley’s costumes seem dreamily out of scale – but it’s the deranged grandeur of it all that makes Crimson Peak so moving. It’s a paean to the lavish romance of other lifetimes.
Speaking of glory gone to ruin, Lance Armstrong is the subject of Stephen Frears’s safety-helmeted biopic The Program (Studiocanal, 15), a film that sets out to tell us precisely what we already know about the champion cyclist’s doping-fuelled downfall, in precisely the way we’d expect it to be dramatised – with a diligent impersonation of cold, clenched determination from Ben Foster as Armstrong himself. From the artificial triumphs of the Tour de France to the tell-all Oprah interview, there’s not a beat here that wasn’t covered more thoroughly in Alex Gibney’s documentary The Armstrong Lie; what’s missing is any dramatic sense, however speculative, of the man in private. Only Jesse Plemons’s remarkable performance as eventual whistleblower Floyd Landis contains a glimmer of life behind the headlines; a film about him might have been more rewarding.
Still speaking of glory gone to ruin, spare a thought for Michel Hazanavicius. Fresh from a shower of Oscars for his beguiling silent comedy The Artist, he poured his new-found industry cred into an ambitious pet project intended to show off his skill as A Serious Director: an update of a Fred Zinnemann second world war classic from 1948. Two years after its Cannes premiere, it crawls straight to DVD in the UK. What went wrong? Almost everything, sad to say, in The Search (Studiocanal, 15), a well-meaning but terminally windy anti-war parable in which Bérénice Bejo flounders shrilly as a stressed NGO worker who opens her heart and home to a pre-teen refugee during the Russian invasion of Chechnya. Having previously triumphed without the help of words, Hazanavicius now goes all in on sticky, hand-wringing rhetoric. “It’s just all horrifying,” drones Annette Bening’s dead-eyed orphanage aide. She’s not wrong.
There’s some welcome cheer, however slight, on offer in Bill (Universal, PG), a jaunty, cardboard-built reworking of Shakespeare’s life story from the Horrible Histories crew that prances amiably where Tom Stoppard and Kenneth Williams’s satirical sensibilities intersect. It’s innocuous family viewing for parents seeking something a shade more improving than the Adam Sandler-written Hotel Transylvania 2 (Sony, U), which nonetheless represents a good-humoured improvement on its predecessor, with a none-too-subtextual message of social acceptance woven into its undead hijinks.
Unaccompanied adults, however, may have more fun – not all of it intentional – by firing up Netflix, where Charles Stone III’s riotously overwrought feminist vigilante thriller Lila & Eve has quietly made its UK debut. Critically buried at Sundance last year, this tale of two grief-stricken mothers avenging the deaths of their children is nonetheless a fascinatingly discordant melange of ripe B-movie camembert and genuinely steaming social protest, gutsily carried by its two leads. After The Boy Next Door, Jennifer Lopez is becoming an earnestly good sport in exploitation fare, but it’s Viola Davis’s hot, bristling characterisation that welds you in place: she has an uncanny gift for finding the hardest truth in the hoariest scripts, and just about makes this nonsense essential.
