8. "Romance" Meant Bluebeards, Bloody Chambers And Red Rooms
Seen In: Crimson Peak, Fifty Shades Of Grey, Ex Machina As Guillermo Del Toro spent most of October insisting his Halloween-released haunted house tale Crimson Peak was not a horror but a "gothic romance", it should be pretty clear that 2015 had a kind of funny idea about what "romance" means. Del Toro's film closely follows the plot beats of the Bluebeard story, the archetype of gothic romance in which an innocent ingenue (here played by Mia Wasikowska) moves to a remote gothic mansion of sinister secrets, is seduced by a charming but brooding man (Tom Hiddleston), and forbidden from entering a locked room in which she discovers the "bloody chamber" with the dismembered remains of his former wives. Crimson Peak hits every one of these moments, but the same archetype is the cornerstone of everything from Jane Eyre to Rebecca to Beauty And The Beast, and in 2015 Del Toro was far from the only filmmaker to plough this particular narrative furrow. This twisted tale was also evoked by the year's biggest romantic hit, which took Bluebeard and his bloody chamber to a penthouse apartment with a "red room" full of bondage gear. Fifty Shades Of Grey's ingenue, Dakota Johnson's Ana, has perhaps only a temporary reprieve from her tormentor, though, with a sequel sure to try and sell us on Christian Grey's romantic side. Probably the most interesting riff on these themes was sci-fi three-hander Ex Machina, in which the same archetypes played out in a high tech story of artificial intelligence. A pre-Star Wars Oscar Isaac made an excellent Bluebeard-cum-Frankenstein-cum-Steve Jobs as the reclusive inventor charming Domnhall Gleeson, keeping a cyborg in the cellar and a bloody chamber of dismembered robot parts.