But it has a low-key self-awareness about its identity and methods, including an entire metaphysical system that supports the plot, that ends up being unexpectedly compelling. This film isn’t here to, as reality show contestants like to say, make friends, but to be true to itself, and it takes a righteous path in that regard, right down to its ending, which stays true to the spirit of John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe as well as the source material, James O’Barr’s graphic novel. The violence is breathtakingly brutal even by revenge thriller standards – extravagant, deliberately over-the-top in the style of an arthouse/grindhouse thriller like “Drive” or “Only God Forgives” – as if the film is going out of its way to shock an audience that thinks it’s unflappable.
And the decision to spend so much time showing us wide-eyed, sad 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 fleeing a dark secret, as a person with her own identity and backstory, pays off pretty late in the story, even if it can be a little frustrating early on. After Shelly’s death, the film takes a turn that, without giving anything specific away, is so solidly romantic, in the style of an “elegy written in a rural churchyard,” that, in an age when any form of sincerity is reflexively dismissed as “embarrassing,” the film deserves applause for moving that far at all, and even more applause for following the decision to its dramatically inevitable conclusion, offering the audience an ending that feels right, even if it’s not the one that sends viewers home with a smile on their faces.
It’s true that there’s no universe in which you could call it a great movie, or even an inherently commercial one. Twigs is likable but gives a rather thin performance, and Skarsgård doesn’t fare much better, despite seeming to fully immerse themselves in the love story. It might have helped if the characters hadn’t seemed stoned, even when they weren’t on drugs. Director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” the live-action “Ghost in the Shell”) relies too heavily on stereotypical “romping lovers” montage footage that tries to be loaded with secondary meaning (Eric kisses Shelly through a sheer white curtain reminiscent of a shroud, and after her death there’s a “Titanic”-esque image of her sinking into the darkness of a harbor despite Eric’s outstretched hand). These really could have been more productively replaced with more, you know, actual elements. Scenes where the two behave, you know, PeopleAll of that, plus the extreme violence and less-than-happy ending, probably explains why Lionsgate is dumping The Crow with no press screenings and (seemingly) little promotion or marketing.
