The 2024 version of The Crow Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard

“Do you think angsty teens will build little shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA Twigs) asks her fellow troubled-lover-on-the-run Eric (Bill Skarsgård) – which is an appropriate question, verging on too meta, to ask during a long-developed, sparsely attended remake of The Crow. That’s exactly what angsty teens did to the first adaptation of James O’Barr’s goth comic book from 1994, not least because of the real-life tragedy at its center. The on-set death of star Brandon Lee, days before shooting concluded, made his performance doubly haunting, anchoring a movie that, in some ways, probably shouldn’t have existed. Somehow, we got to see it anyway – and ghoulish as it is, The Crow makes clear why Lee’s family signed off on that unveiling. He’s an unforgettable presence: physically beguiling, scary, sad, funny. He earned those shrines from the angsty teens, whether goth kids in love with the makeup, theater kids digging the performative strangeness, or aggro kids digging the righteous violence.

Lee also helped assure that future versions of The Crow would seem like they shouldn’t exist either, for the exact opposite reason: Without Lee, and without the 1994 film’s immersive urban-decay visuals, any retelling would feel disposable. (In fact, even with one of those elements intact – returning production designer Alex McDowell created a different but similarly vivid world for The Crow: City of Angels – it felt like a dicey proposition.) The 30-years-later 2024 version of The Crow isn’t precisely an exception. As untrustworthy as fanbases can be, it wouldn’t be closeminded to dismiss this remake out of hand; the same was true of director Rupert Sanders’ last foray into unassailable youth-culture classics, his 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell. The man must be a glutton for a particular brand of internet-era punishment.

Yet like his Shell remake, the Sanders Crow makes something oddly compelling out of a bad idea. The basic story remains the same: Eric and Shelly’s youthful passion is cut horrifically short by murder (though no sexual violence component this time around), and an initially befuddled Eric returns from the dead, imbued with physical invincibility and guided (vaguely) by a crow, eventually seeking revenge against his – and, especially, Shelly’s – killers. But while the 1994 film jumped right into Eric’s year-later return, filling in the rest via flashbacks (in part a necessity given the circumstances of Lee’s death), the new one spends a fair amount of time with the couple before tragedy strikes. No longer a rock star and his activist girlfriend, Eric and Shelly now meet as haunted-past guests in a strict rehab facility that often resembles a stylized, Arkham-like asylum.

If this sounds a bit like the Joker and Harley Quinn, wait until you get a load of Eric’s face tats. That’s not just an opportunistic knock-off: Lee’s performance had Joker vibes, too, a kind of otherworldly drollery that isn’t worlds away from the Clown Prince of Crime. Between his tattoos and leather jacket, Skarsgård may look like he could be playing the young CW-series version of Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad, but he and Twigs unlocked a doomed romanticism that the earlier versions of Eric and Shelly didn’t have time for. He’s not as magnetic as Lee, but his wounded dirtbagginess is complemented by Twigs, who plays Shelly as an artsy type who hasn’t yet located her muse (or genre). For a revenge thriller, the movie takes its time with their relationship. They’re not exactly going out for long and thoughtful dinners – their first real date is a rehab break-out – but their connection pulls the movie along.