But it has a low-key confidence about its identity and methods, including an entire metaphysical system supporting the plot, that’s unexpectedly persuasive by the end. This film is not, as reality show contestants like to say, here to make friends, but to be true to itself, and it walks a righteous path in that regard, all the way to its ending, which is 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 staggeringly brutal even by revenge-thriller standards—flamboyantly, consciously excessive in the manner of an art-house/grindhouse thriller like “Drive” or “Only God Forgives”—as if the movie is going all out to shock an audience that fancies itself un-shockable.
And the decision to spend so much time showing us big-eyed sad-sack Eric Draven (played by Bill Skarsgård) prior to his supernatural transformation, and to develop Eric’s lover Shelly (musician FKA Twigs), a woman on the fringes of the goth underworld who’s running from a dark secret, as a person with her own identity and backstory, pays off fairly deep into the story, even though it can be a little frustrating early on. Post-Shelly’s death, the movie takes a turn that, without revealing anything specific, is so rock-solidly capital-R Romantic, in an “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” kind of way, that in an age where any form of sincerity is reflexively dismissed as “cringe,” the movie deserves applause for even going there, and more applause for following the decision to its dramatically inevitable conclusion and giving audiences the ending that feels right, even if it’s not the one that’ll send viewers home with smiles on their faces.
It’s true that there’s no universe in which it can be called 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 their apparently complete investment in the love story. It might’ve helped if the characters didn’t seem stoned even when they aren’t doing drugs. Director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” the live-action “Ghost in the Shell”) relies too much on stereotypical “lovers frolicking” montage material that seems to want to be charged with secondary meaning (Eric kisses Shelly through a sheer white curtain that suggests a burial shroud, and after her death, there’s a “Titanic”-y image of her sinking into the murk of a harbor despite Eric’s outstretched hand). These really could’ve been more productively swapped out for more, you know, actual scenes where the two behave like, you know, people. All that plus the extreme violence and the not-upbeat ending probably explain why “The Crow” is being dumped by its studio, Lionsgate, without any press screenings and (seemingly) little advertising or marketing.