‘The Crow’ Review: Rupert Sanders’ Reimagining is DOA
The horror genre has not only created some of the scariest stories of all time, but also some of the deepest romances seen on screen. From the passion between Dracula and Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the murderous love between Chucky and Tiffany in Don Mancini’s Chucky franchise, horror isn’t just about death; it can very much be about the terrifying power of love. Unfortunately, Rupert Sanders’ adaptation of The Crow has been denied entry into that pantheon of romance horror. Despite, on paper, being a film entirely about eternal love, this take on The Crow is the opposite of romantic, a clunky, stiff, and convoluted horror re-imagining more awkward than any first date.
Shelly (FKA twigs) and Eric (Bill Skarsgård) meet in rehab, clad in bubblegum pink jumpsuits and forced to attend group meetings about their trauma. Shelly is in after getting caught with drugs and Eric? He’s the mysterious guy with terrible tattoos, a lot of bad poetry on the walls of his room, and a silent demeanor that would attract most women who think they like bad boys. And of course, the two quickly find love in a hopeless place, escaping the facility and starting a boho life of their own that flits through the halls of her extravagant apartment.
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But Shelly is also a woman on the run. She has a video that evil billionaire Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston) wants and will stop at nothing to get. It’s evidence that he is, in fact, a supernatural being who has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal life. Yes, Sanders brings the supernatural in early and fast to craft a secret cabal of well-clad cronies who work tirelessly to protect Roeg’s secret and feed him a steady diet of young women. So when his cronies finally find Shelly and Eric, it’s curtains for the lovers.
Until, of course, Eric is revived by his own rage and sets out on a quest for revenge to save the love of his life.
Dear reader nothing about this film works. The main purpose of The Crow is to tell a love story, one that transcends death, and to do that, your leads need chemistry. Sadly, Skarsgård and twigs don’t have much of that. Their meet cute feels like something I read on Tumblr in 2012 and their love story happens so fast that there’s no time to really care about them as a couple. They read more as two toxic people looking for a quick high in each other. That would be an interesting story if it was actually given any depth or consideration.
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Instead, it’s just edgelord love fueled by alcohol, drugs, and sex in lavish apartments. Plus, the editing and the script make this relationship seem like only a few weeks long. Flashbacks later in the film give the sense that perhaps they were together longer than depicted but who knows! Sanders sure doesn’t and again this feels like a relationship viewed through drug-fueled lenses rather than any sort of true deep love.
So when Shelly is killed and Eric is resurrected, it feels incredibly unearned. Yes this is The Crow and it’s what’s supposed to happen but nothing about this feels like love. There’s no real reason to cheer for Eric other than we’re supposed to given the source material. Frankly, it’s lazy and feels like Sanders checking boxes rather than caring at all about the story at hand. If you’re going to show the two doomed lovers meet and fall in love, you need to actually commit to developing that relationship. But instead, Sanders rushes back into half-baked supernatural horror, leaving us with a relationship that Shelly’s friends would be gossiping about in the group chat.
To the film’s credit, there’s one set piece about an hour in that’s a whisper of what this could have been. Here Eric absolutely massacres a group of security guards with a samurai sword. It’s brutal with some pretty gnarly slaughtering, but it comes way too late to salvage the damage that’s been done by the rest of the story.
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Skarsgård really does his best here, and there are glimmers of something interesting in his performance, especially as he screams in pain as his bones and flesh knit back together after getting shot, hit, and any other matter of injury. But unfortunately the characterization of Eric as a self-harming emo boy who’s never been in love because the world is mean waters down Skarsgård’s performance to a basic portrayal of a sad man with nothing to lose.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, my biggest gripe with The Crow is that it perpetuates narratives about men grappling for control and ownership over a dead woman’s body. This is a common thread in most revenge films, yes, but in 2024 it feels more obvious than ever that the revenge tales of old need to be rewritten past male chivalry and desire to prove their masculine power to avenge their fallen angel. Shelly’s story is a tragic one that hints at grooming and even sexual assault. Yet those are just plot devices used to Roeg more cartoonishly evil. Women’s suffering is once again nothing more than a plot point to prove how bad a man is.
Sanders was already 0-2 coming into The Crow and now he’s 0-3. His vision of gothic love is nothing more than a Pinterest board understanding of the subculture with a supernatural filter put over it to hopefully hide any missteps. But really, The Crow is best described as a misstep, a gross misunderstanding of the source material with no soul to speak of. But what else did we really expect from the director of the live-action Ghost In The Shell?
Summary
The Crow is best described as a misstep, a gross misunderstanding of the source material with no soul to speak of.
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