If you’re looking for cheap thrills at the movie theater this weekend, Crimson Peak is not the film for you. From acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro, Crimson Peak is a gothic romance that pays tribute to movie history and spins a tale that captures and horrifies its audience. A film of ghosts and the dangers of love, Crimson Peak stars Mia Wasikowska (Stoker), Tom Hiddleston (Only Lovers Left Alive) and Jessica Chastain (The Martian).

Edith (Wasikowska) is an aspiring writer and as a young woman in turn of the century American society, it’s made very clear she needs to find her place as a woman in the world. If she’s going to write, she can’t write ghost stories, or stories with any real depth…she needs to write romance. At a time of dire need, trying to find her place, Edith meets Mr. Thomas Sharpe, a young baronet from England who has come to America looking for funds to mine the red clay that rests on his property. But it seems he and his sister Lucille have other plans while in America and Edith is at the center of those plans.

As Edith and Thomas’ romance progresses, it’s clear that this isn’t your typical romance film. Del Toro reaches into cinematic history with his film, paying tribute to great gothic romances, which were all the rage in the 1940s. He came forward to say that films in the past had been “brilliantly written by women and then rendered into films by male directors who reduce the potency of the female characters” and he sought to reverse this trope with Crimson Peak.

To say he is a success is an understatement. Where the film does follow the typical gothic romance themes, with an added flare of horror and ghosts, it gives Edith’s character a chance to develop and become a woman worth rooting for by the end of the film. And your connection with all the characters is strong by the climax of the film, and although they may be a villain, you understand their motives, because a person in love will do anything for that love, even the unthinkable.

Crimson Peak is not one you will want to miss. Don’t let the trailers daunt you, that it will scare you too much. It will horrify you, but not in the way that you believe it will. The ghosts aren’t what you should fear at Allerdale Hall, but the very living people residing in it.

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures/Legendary Pictures