Review by Keri O’Shea
The Raven feels as though it has sneaked up on its audience a bit. I remember hearing about this proposed release a long time ago: my initial excitement gave way to a sneaking suspicion that the whole project had collapsed in on itself, as so often happens to compelling projects – and then, out of the blue almost, here we are – The Raven is alive and well and on general release. So has it been worth the wait?
What I will say in the film’s favour from the outset is that it dares to do something a bit different with rather tried-and-tested subject matter. Poe must be one of the best-represented authors, if not the best represented author in horror cinema – and it seems that the author and his works are impossible to differentiate between in the minds of many filmmakers in a way which is quite unusual. And yet, for all the various versions of the man himself we’ve seen over the years, we haven’t really had Poe as a man of action. The Raven not only brings us this man of action, but it also places the originator of detective fiction at the heart of a detective story. The result is an enjoyable, though at times rather strained story which doesn’t quite live up to its promise.
Rather like From Hell (2001), The Raven uses a factual basis – in both cases, an unsolved mystery – and then extrapolates a plot around those real-life events. Here, we have an imaginative exploration of the last few days of Poe’s life. The real Poe was found in mysterious circumstances: no one knows what happened to him in the few days before he was picked up, incoherent, outside a tavern in Baltimore and taken to a nearby hospital, where he died the next day. The Raven fantasises about a turn of events which lead up to that death. In its universe, Poe is in love with a beautiful young heiress called Emily (Alice Eve), whose father (Brendan Gleesson) perhaps understandably isn’t all that keen on her spending time with the ‘thirsty’ man of letters. However, the presence in Baltimore of a serial killer who seems to be copying killings from Poe’s short stories soon supersedes that little problem, and Poe begins to work alongside the Baltimore Police to try and capture the murderer. The killer makes it personal when he kidnaps Miss Emily, and threatens to kill her, if Poe does not engage with him by writing short stories about the situation at his behest while both Poe and Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans), who is leading the case, try desperately to find her.
For me, the screenplay smacked of graphic novel somehow. I’ve know I mentioned From Hell – which obviously was a graphic novel – but The Raven just had something to it which made me wonder if it had first appeared in that format (though it didn’t) with its lashings of self-awareness, history-lite style and pacey plot lines. What this film basically does is to rework a tried-and-tested literary figure – rather like Sherlock Holmes, say – into a more urbane form: John Cusack’s Poe has a young love interest, a race against time to complete and the potential to save the day, which does make for an engaging story. Pulling a figure like Poe into that mix isn’t without its issues, though. I think that Cusack did a reasonable job in the role, because the real Poe was an odd character, and combining Poe’s extreme torpor with this extreme excitability was always going to be a tough call (it would have been interesting to see what Ewan McGregor or Joaquin Phoenix, who were both in line for the role of Poe, would have made of it). At times, perhaps, I felt that there were rather too many elements to the character of Poe as brought to the screen here – a little ‘all things to all men’. This ‘all things to all men’ approach also seemed to mean that, to ground the character in the real-life writer who inspired it, it was necessary to load as much direct quotation of Poe poetry/prose into the film as possible, and some of this felt a little unnecessary.
The period detail is well-observed though, looks appealing, and in terms of gore there is quite a bit of blood during the course of this film. Hey, if you like Poe’s short stories, you might care to take a guess at some of the methods of dispatch you may see if you go to see this… sadly though, the filmmakers have plumped for ample CGI blood splatter, for reasons best known to themselves, and this does make the murders feel a little less realistic – a shame, really. Still, ours not to reason why.
Though there are flaws, overall this is a reasonably entertaining movie with some decent ideas at its core – it’s just that in the execution of these ideas there are some issues, and certainly some issues with the big reveal at the end, although the twist ending could have been played out in a much more obvious way which would have lost a fair few audience members’ sympathies, I’m sure. I suppose the more you know about Poe – the more you have an opinion on the man, or his work – the harder it might be to relax into the right viewing mode here, because you will see a few things stretched a long way to accommodate the plot, despite knowing that this is not a biopic. Also, if you’ve seen Jeffrey Combs playing Poe in the Masters of Horror series, you may well find yourself making some comparisons…
The Raven is in UK & US cinemas now, from Universal.