Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024)

The fourth live-action Hellboy, and the second attempt to reboot him into relevance, arrives with the humility of a direct-to-VOD release and the ambition of a folk horror chamber piece. Brian Taylor strands his horned protagonist in 1959 Appalachia, where a company town has been hollowed out by coal mines and by something older feeding on the souls trapped inside them. The photography is crepuscular, the dialect is thick, and the Crooked Man himself, a lanky construction of practical makeup and spite, generates real backwoods dread. It is a smaller and stranger film than its predecessors, and for stretches it works.

The cultural ledger here is thin. Adeline Rudolph headlines as Bobbie Jo Song, a rookie agent invented for the screen, and Joseph Marcell appears as a blind reverend. Neither arrival is accompanied by a syllable of commentary about it. The film's progressive content begins and ends with a competent woman who resolves the climax by dispelling captive souls, which is action-horror agency of the oldest and most conventional kind. The mines whisper something about a community stripped of its labor and its dignity, a theme inherited from the source comics, though the film never presses the point. Where the great engines of contemporary messaging might have roared, we get a faint exhaust note.

No romantic subtext beyond the heterodox, no environmental sermon, no meditation on body image despite a gentle demon in a hulking frame, no neurodivergent arc, no reconsideration of the historical record. The nearest thing to preaching is Reverend Watts declining eternal youth and sight in exchange for a friend, which is theology, not a lecture. What remains is a creature feature that dispenses gore where its contemporaries dispense lessons, and seems untroubled by the trade. We could call that refreshing. It is at least quiet.