The Raven (2012)

James McTeigue's The Raven arrives as a period murder mystery set in 1849 Baltimore, in which Edgar Allan Poe is conscripted by the police to track a killer who stages his crimes after the author's own stories. John Cusack plays Poe with a weary, hollowed-out melancholy. The film has the good sense to treat its historical setting as a setting, not a platform. The streets are muddy, the newspapers are cutthroat, and nobody pauses to deliver a lesson on the moral failings of the age. It is, in the most literal sense, a film about a man chasing a murderer through tunnels.

The cast is uniformly pale and period-appropriate, which is to say the production made no effort to retrofit the demographics of 1849 Maryland to flatter a modern audience. Alice Eve's Emily exists chiefly to be kidnapped and rescued, a narrative function the film never troubles to interrogate. Poe himself is eccentric and self-destructive, but the screenplay frames this as the romantic torment of a nineteenth-century artist, not as a case study in contemporary diagnostic vocabulary. The newspapers chase circulation, and the film regards this as local color, not as an indictment of capital.

There is no environmental sermon, no body-image discourse, no racial reckoning, no lecture. The movie wants to be a thriller and mostly fails at that on its own merits, which is its own kind of honesty. It received a critical drubbing, debuted seventh at the box office, and vanished. For the purposes of cultural classification, we can report that it carries essentially no progressive signaling of the contemporary variety. It is a film out of its time in the least interesting way available: it belongs to 2012, and to no movement at all. The ledger stays clean, and the sommelier has nothing to swirl.

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