The past year has been quite the treat for fans of visually evocative cinema; we have already visited the calculative scifi confines of Ex Machina, the nihilistic landscapes of Sicario, and the utterly bonkers post-apocalypse of Mad Max: Fury Road. And now, just in time for the Halloween season, fantasy guru Guillermo del Toro invites us to one hell of a tea party at Allerdale Hall. Crimson Peak is a sinister Victorian romance brimming with ornate elegance and Gothic grandeur, which nonetheless suffers from the occasional dizzy spells of convoluted exposition and excess of theatricality. However, if you are able to overcome its hammier moments, there is lots of fun to be had plummeting down this macabre rabbit hole. Horror consumers accustomed to the twist-heavy legacy of M. Night Shyamalan may be taken aback by how straightforwardly Crimson Peak plays its tale of a young American author (Mia Wasikowska) falling in love with a mysterious English baronet (Tom Hiddleston). Throughout its long production cycle, del Toro was always intent on making a haunted house story that had an earnest voice: “I’m out of step with the culture a little bit. I’m never ironic, I’m never postmodern, ever.” His newest English-language feature does feel like an old-fashioned odd duck amidst today's found footage frighteners and cattle prod shockers by James Wan or ardent followers who want to make money direct movies just like James Wan.

Largely dismissing such iterations of contemporary horror, Crimson Peak rather sinks its teeth into the stylistic veins of 19th century heavyweights such as Edgar Allan Poe and the Brontë sisters. There are also tangents to the fleshy world-building of Clive Barker: deformed monstrosities materialize out of thin air, and ominous red goo keeps seeping through the cracks and crevices of the baronet's decrepit manor. Furthermore, Stephen King's admiration for the film may be interpreted from the fact that Crimson Peak's premise – a would-be author moving into a haunted house – echoes King's own tale about a dull boy called Jack...

The film certainly boasts an impressive level of cineliteracy, yet the impetus of this lavish nightmare feels intimately linked to the seemingly boundless (and delightfully deranged) imagination of Guillermo del Toro himself. The visual details and direction are nothing short of spectacular: dozens of smaller fables and anecdotes are constantly bursting through the meticulously framed shots of oil paintings, gramophones and aged library tomes. Del Toro also spent a lot of time color-correcting the picture, and the end-product (which the he describes as “eye-protein”) evokes otherworldly awe as well as fond reminiscences of Tim Burton's Gothic masterpieces from decades past.

I could also go on a passionate rant about Kate Hawley's praised costume designs –if I understood a single thing about fashion. But since I don't, I'll just wing it by declaring that the various dresses and suits looked pretty damn sweet! For one thing, the fluidity of Jessica Chastain's wispy chemise as she rushes down a winding staircase has to be the single most arresting image of the entire film. I haven't been paying attention to the other costume dramas of the year, but I'd be very surprised if Crimson Peak were not a strong contender for the Best Costume Design category in next year's Academy Awards.

The saturated visuals do however run the risk of covering the story's logical flow beneath the tapestry of artistic indulgence. Character motivations feel muddled at times, and the viewer's suspension of disbelief may be rattled when the scandalous secrets of Allerdale Hall begin to unravel in a worrisomely cumbersome fashion. The relative lack of explanatory devices such as flashbacks becomes both a strength and weakness: while it is commendable that the film sticks to exploring its characters head-on in the present, this also means that the actors have to manage quite a bit of loaded exposition between the more visceral sequences of horror and suspense.

However, such narrative lapses never detract from the passion the film has for its romantic horror milieu. The creaking of floorboards and howling of easterlies are effectively timed, and there is a joyful quality to moments when blood-red clay gushes out of a bathroom tap in stead of water. Towards its end, the film blossoms into a blood-curdling finale which includes some of the most accomplished cinema violence since David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. It is the kind of kitchen knife frenzy that would have garnered approval from the late horror maestro Wes Craven, who always insisted that films justify the presence of their violent content. Even during its near unbearable moments of surgical terror, del Toro never fails to connect the physical injuries with the sexual tensions and emotional scars of the fair heroine and her dastardly adversaries.

And it is a known fact that Guillermo del Toro always sympathizes with his monsters. The  denouement's ghostly apparitions reminded me of the ethereal beauty in the director's earlier ghost tale The Devil's Backbone, demonstrating that the main purpose of the supernatural is not to terrify us, but to reveal our monstrous features as humans. Some viewers have been put off by the CGI touch ups of the ghosts, but I personally felt a genuine physical heft to their creepy cameos (which is largely thanks to the skillful creature performances by Doug Jones).

Out of the non-ghost-human performances, everyone pulls their weight with professional gusto. Tom Hiddleston feels right at place as the suave aristocrat whom you distrust the moment he enters the room, and Mia Wasikowska is graceful in a lead role that demands a lot of Jane Austen-y subtlety of expression.

Yet it is Jessica Chastain who steals the show as the baronet's brittle sister, Lucille. Her icy demeanor is accentuated by instances when she forces an awkward smile, or when she off-handedly describes her deceased mother as “awful”. Some of the dialogue does feel unnecessarily overblown, but overall it is great to see that such stylized performances are still cherished in this day and age, when documentary realism à la Paranormal Activity seems to be all the rage.

Much like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Crimson Peak is probably best enjoyed as a delight of the senses rather than as an exemplar of hermetic storytelling. It is also a keen historical reminder of the contribution women made to establishing horror fiction as a popular literary genre, both as authors as well as characters immortalized in the fictional canon. And hey, if nothing else, it does feature Hiddleston busting some groovy ballroom moves – which is never a bad thing.