The Crow (2024) Movie Review and Summary

But the film has a quiet confidence in its identity and methods, including a whole metaphysical system that underpins the plot, which proves surprisingly convincing by the end. This is not a movie, as reality TV contestants like to say, about making friends, but about being true to itself, and it follows a virtuous path in that regard, right up to its ending, which is true to the spirit of John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe as well as to the source material, James O’Barr’s graphic novel. The violence is staggeringly brutal even by revenge thriller standards – flamboyant and self-consciously excessive in the way of an arthouse/grindhouse thriller like “Drive” or “Only God Forgives” – as if the film were going out of its way to shock an audience that believes itself unwatchable.

And the decision to spend so much time showing us the sad, wide-eyed Eric Draven (played by Bill Skarsgård) before his supernatural transformation, and to develop Eric’s lover Shelly (musician FKA Twigs), a woman on the fringes of the goth underworld who is running from a dark secret, as a person with her own identity and history, pays off fairly late in the story, even if it can be a little frustrating at first. After Shelly’s death, the film takes a turn that, without revealing anything specific, is so solidly Romantic with a capital R, in the manner of an “elegy written in a country churchyard,” that in an age when any form of sincerity is automatically dismissed as “embarrassing,” the film deserves applause for even broaching the subject, and even more applause for following the decision through to its dramatically inevitable conclusion and giving the audience the ending that feels right, even if it’s not the one that will send viewers home with a smile on their face.

It’s true that there’s no universe in which this movie could be called great, or even inherently commercial. Twigs is likable but gives a weak performance, and Skarsgård doesn’t fare much better, despite his seemingly total investment in the love story. It might have helped if the characters didn’t seem stoned even when they’re not on drugs. Director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” the live-action “Ghost in the Shell”) relies too much on stereotypical “boys in love” montages that seem to be loaded with secondary meaning (Eric kisses Shelly through a sheer white curtain that suggests a funeral shroud, and after she dies, there’s a “Titanic” shot of her sinking into the darkness of a harbor despite Eric’s outstretched hand). Those elements really could have been more productively traded for more real, you know, elements. scenes where both of them behave like, you know, people. All of this, coupled with the extreme violence and the less-than-optimistic ending, probably explains why “The Crow” was abandoned by its studio, Lionsgate, without any press screenings and (apparently) little publicity or marketing.