Overview: Bill Skarsgård takes on the iconic role of THE CROW in this modern reimagining of the original graphic novel by James O’Barr. Soulmates Eric (Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs) 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.

Verdict: “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.

The Crow also involves an overtly supernatural villain, after years of crime lords and corrupt cops who only looked and/or acted like demons (and often evinced a surprisingly keen knowledge of crow lore for supposed humans). Surprisingly, the movie doesn’t use this to build toward a bigger, more formidable showdown with the powered-up Eric. (The bad guy, for all of his creepy power, is still just Danny Huston in a suit).

For much of the movie, Skarsgård is endearingly clumsy with his body, pushing through bullets, breaks and slashes with more determination than skill. In a particularly emo touch, the 2024 Crow more overtly explains that the repeated mangling of Eric’s body, like those visited upon Wolverine, hurt and heal in equal measure. Even his craziest rampage, late in the movie, features blood-soaked body horror and slasher-style kills. (Why did it take so long to give the Crow a sword?)

Sanders sets that sequence at an elegant opera house, a neat inversion of the usual Crow environment of industrial-gothic wreckage. It’s one of only a few instances where the movie bothers to replace the defining Crow aesthetic with anything else in terms of memorable production design.

The rest of the time, it opts out; there’s something intensely jarring about a Crow movie that cuts to generic daylight, establishing shots of a real city skyline. Sanders dots the movie with more cost-effective dreamlike touches – the pink uniforms the rehab inmates must all wear, for example, or the in-between train-station world where Eric gets advice from a mysterious, purgatorial stranger (Sami Bouajila) – without ever achieving the hallucinatory liftoff of the first film.

It’s an unnecessarily timid decision, likely egged on by the sense that the filmmakers could create something more grounded in human emotion, rather than the uncanny or the nightmarish. Indeed, The Crow 2024 is, as indicated by that teen-angst line, more self-conscious about its youth-culture bona fides; there’s not a single sympathetic (human) character who registers as a genuine fully grown adult, even if the soundtrack largely jumps back to pre-grunge rather than trying to find the contemporary equivalent.