The Crow
Directed by Rupert Sanders
- action
- fantasy
- horror
The story
Soulmates Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
What it’s like
Dark, drenched and saturated: rain-slick Detroit streets under sodium streetlight and bruised blue night, with neon and fire flaring in deep reds and cold steel greys, and a monochrome underworld that drains almost to ash. The camera moves hard and fast, with handheld chaos and stylised slow-motion around the violence, while the score pulses with industrial rock and synth grind that can swell into near silence before the next blow. The mood is grim, gothic and operatic, a revenge fantasy steeped in grief, with a tender, romantic core that keeps surfacing between the bloodshed. Intensity is high: frequent, graphic violence and gore, shootings, stabbings and brutal beatings, plus dark thematic material around murder and cruelty, with heavy supernatural horror imagery. Pacing is relentless, with long stretches of kinetic action. It suits a late night with the lights off, not a gentle evening. It is for fans of stylised comic-book revenge who want a brooding, visually loud tragedy of devotion and retribution, and it is a poor fit for anyone wanting something soft or low on bloodshed.
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