The Crow (2024)

The Crow arrives as the fifth installment of a franchise that spent fifteen years in development hell, cycling through directors and leading men with the patience of a medieval siege. Rupert Sanders finally delivers a gothic revenge romance in which Bill Skarsgard's Eric claws his way back from a purgatorial rail yard to avenge himself and his musician girlfriend, played by FKA Twigs. It is loud, it is wet, and it is drenched in the sort of rain that only falls on the morally compromised. The film makes no argument beyond the one its title suggests: love, loss, and a great deal of decapitation.

For a property this grim, the casting is unexpectedly cosmopolitan. FKA Twigs, Josette Simon, Sami Bouajila, and Jordan Bolger occupy prominent roles, and the film presents them without a single line of commentary, which is either admirable restraint or simple indifference. We suspect the latter. Shelly is granted a backstory and one genuine moment of agency when she chooses to keep the incriminating video, though the narrative promptly converts her into a soul requiring rescue and mourning. The gesture is noted, then quietly abandoned.

The film does not lecture. There is no sermon on wealth, no ecological lament, no lesson on identity. The villain is a devil-pacting sorcerer and crime lord, which is to say a villain from a much older tradition, unburdened by any economic critique. The result is a moody, violent, and largely apolitical exercise in gothic excess, the kind of picture that wants only to look striking and hurt people on screen. It succeeds at both, and at very little else.