UK Release Date: 09-03-2012
Starring: John Cusack, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson
UK Certificate: 15
Director: James McTeigue
Country: USA
Distributor: Universal Pictures International

The mystery of Edgar Allen Poe’s last days is given extremely speculative treatment in this reasonably gory thriller-cum-horror from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta). It stars the ever-youthful John Cusack as a booze-guzzling braggart of a Poe, who we first meet as he recites his poetry to some Nineteenth-Century Baltimore tavern chavs. This pretty much sets the template for the whole film, which, for all its preposterous, overblown nature, manages to sustain the tension for most of its two hours’ running time.

The film begins with Poe alone on a park bench in Baltimore, the worse for wear, staring vacantly at the sky. This much has some semblance of historical accuracy about it, Poe expiring soon after in reality in 1849, the cause of his death remaining a mystery. Track back in time four days: a fiendish murderer is abroad in Baltimore and proto-forensic detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) is having a hard time catching the culprit until he realises at a murder site that: “This scene is familiar to me”. That would be because Fields is a man who has read his Poe, and the killings mirror those found in some of Poe’s classic tales, among them ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. Who better to aid him in his hunt than the writer of those stories himself? Poe’s response is, well, po-faced at first, to say the least; but when his sweetheart Emily (Alice Eve) becomes a target for the fiendish maniac, Poe is compelled to join the hunt.

The Raven is Grand Guignol for the masses, and great fun because of it. Screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare know when to rein in the wisecracks and let the unfolding horror come to the fore, which is by turns of the Saw and 7even kind. One of the provisos for preventing another death is also the cure for Poe’s writer’s block: he must serialise the events as they happen in the daily newspaper. As his tormentor explains: “I used to live for your stories; when you stopped writing them I guess I went a bit nuts.”

The cast do their best. Alice Eve has nothing much to do but play corseted damsel in distress, but she convinces you that you’d do all in your power to save her. Brendan Gleeson as her rich, disapproving father has little more to do himself, other than turn red with incandescent rage, but is more than a match for a rampant Cusack who looks (still) much too young to be the soul-weary, weathered, daguerreotyped Poe of the poached egg eyes playing out his last days – but he manages to manifest the writer’s growing torment enough to compensate. McTeigue’s direction relies at times on breathless exposition and garbled explanation to gloss over shortfalls in the suspension of our disbelief, but there’s more than enough nastiness throughout to keep you guessing about the outcome right till the end.

If you revere Poe as a writer and are expecting an insightful biopic, stay away… for evermore! But The Raven doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of failing to know itself, as so many films do: it’s a fantasy horror outing, nothing more, with its severed tongue firmly in its cheek. With no pretensions otherwise and enough of the mysterious and the macabre to satisfy, it’s bloody good fun.