The Crow: The BRWC Review

25th August 2024

The Crow: The BRWC Review. By Sarah Manvel.

The deeply underappreciated director Rupert Sanders has given us the deeply wonderful The Crow, based on the nineties comic by James O’Barr, and heavily in the shadow of the first movie adaptation from 1994, directed by Alex Proyas, during which an on-site accident claimed the life of its star Brandon Lee. But to compare 2024’s The Crow with the 1994 version is false; the only parallels are the names of the lead characters and the concept of the crow accompanying the souls of the dead into the afterlife.

On its own merits, The Crow is an astonishing movie about an unloved young man learning just how deep a capacity for love he actually has, based around a disturbingly good central performance from Bill Skarsgård. It is also so violent it is very nearly unwatchable, and certainly the fight scenes are filled with a level of gore and injury detail which is almost impossible to stomach. But it actually does the thing many movies claim to do: the violence is all an act of love.

Eric (Mr Skarsgård) meets Shelly (FKA Twigs) in a rehab center which is essentially a prison. Eric has such an enormous amount of disturbing tattoos that his gentleness – his knuckle tats spell out PARADISE, for goodness’ sake – is easily overlooked. Shelly is in the center to hide from the evil Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a man whose ability to manipulate others is literally supernatural and quite possibly demonic. He has bottomless wealth and an endless number of henchmen to enforce his bidding, led by the imposing and graceful Marion (Laura Birn). When Marion finds Shelly in rehab Eric decides to join her on the run, and they swiftly fall in love.

They live in an unspecified American city – the movie was filmed in Prague, Munich and Chicago – where Shelly has access to gorgeous penthouse suites belonging to absent friends, and Eric squats in an empty factory filled with countless mannequins wrapped in plastic. It’s there they are attacked and gruesomely murdered, though shortly after Eric finds himself in a waterlogged, abandoned train station populated with hundreds of crows and a guide named in the credits as Kronos (Sami Bouajila). And it’s there he is given the news about the crows, and the choice he can make about returning to the world to seek vengeance on those who killed him and his love.

The major fight sequence takes place in the foyer of an opera house, intercut with the performers onstage, and while this staging is not fresh cinematographer Steve Annis and the editors Chris Dickens and Neil Smith do a gorgeous job of interweaving the onstage melodrama with the bloody mayhem in the halls. The fights are so supremely violent and with such injury detail – Eric discovers his immunity from death when a stabbing wrenches out some of his intestines, and that’s just for starters – that the film very richly deserves its R/18-only rating.

But the thing is, it also deserves to be seen by many teenage boys, because the movie is about the power of love, and the impossible feats true love can motivate a previously unloved boy to do. Both Eric and Shelly are meant to be in their early twenties at the most, meaning both actors are somewhat too old for their parts. That said, both do an excellent job of depicting how thoroughly they felt themselves to be unlovable and how happy they are to realise that is no longer true.

When Eric discovers Shelly is not the perfect person he had thought she was, he also has to make a choice if whether his love for her can remain pure. This is a pretty important lesson for the current moment! And while buckets of gore certainly do help the medicine go down, the abiding sensation the movie leaves behind is that of the masculine capacity to love. There are no sarcastic quips about any of the violence and the pain everyone is in is made brutally clear. The black eye makeup with which Eric smears himself are meant to be tears of blood, too. In a world where violence is more normally in movies treated like a joke, it’s difficult to emphasise how bold and unusual this is. All this hell that Eric is putting himself through is for a higher purpose and there’s nothing funny about any of it. His love for Shelly is the most important thing in his life and the movie takes that seriously. It’s so refreshing.

But it seems the movie is already being harmed by Sanders’s knack for controversy and his seeming inability to make work that’s easily marketed. 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman not only proved Chris Hemsworth could act but also altered the passivity with which fairy-tale heroines were normally portrayed onscreen, within a remarkably violent and violently beautiful setting, but it was overshadowed by personal drama. 2017’s Ghost in the Shell’s casting controversy swallowed the movie, which must have been infuriating, because the movie’s entire point is whether or not a body like Scarlett Johansson’s is actually the most desirable. That movie’s use of cybernetics and artificial intelligence also made the friendly rapport between Ms Johansson and Pilou Asbaek even more important, because they were the only human-ish people left in an increasingly artificial world.

People seem to have expected this version of The Crow to be an adaptation of the one with Mr Lee, and are surprised that instead Mr Sanders has provided an entirely different kind of superhero movie, with love at its core. In the current moment no one seems to know what to do with the feelings of young men, and certainly in Western culture the goal seems to be to suppress those feelings at all costs. The Crow is a pleasing antithesis to that, and let’s hope it’s able to find audiences who will appreciate it for exactly what it is.

By Sarah Manvel.

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