If we learned anything from John Wick 4, it’s that it takes a surprising amount of effort to kill Bill Skarsgård. (That, and you don’t want to climb the Sacré-Coeur steps more than once, if you can help it.) It’s the lesson learned, too, in the long-gestating remake of The Crow. The 1994 original is a cult favourite, in which the late Brandon Lee hit back against the criminal underworld as the resurrected Eric Draven. This new version of the story – directed by Rupert Sanders – casts Bill Skarsgård as the young lover brought back from the dead to try and save the soul of his fellow murdered partner, here played by FKA Twigs. The first trailer promises plenty of gothic stylings (with a 2024 twist), tons of bloody violence, and considerable levels of angst. Give it a watch here:
While there’ll undoubtedly be fans of the ’94 film who refuse to acknowledge any other version of The Crow, you have to admit – there are some striking images here. Not just Skarsgård continuing to stride up a staircase while being riddled with bullets, but a fight in which his Eric Draven is stabbed through the chest with a sword, and then shoots an attacker behind him through his own chest wound. It’s strong stuff – as is the viscerality of the scenes here depicting Eric and Shelly’s murders. There’s a new style for Eric Draven too – the unapologetically emo story last time round resulted in a central figure who was the epitome of ‘90s goth culture. Three decades on, and the emo torch has largely been passed onto autotuned SoundCloud rappers, whose aesthetic seems to be the template for Draven this time around.
Here’s the official synopsis: “Soulmates Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (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.”
Will The Crow inspire a whole new generation of goths? Will it win over the ‘90s fans? And will we ever get to see him fight John Wick? Answers to at least some of those questions will arrive when The Crow hits UK cinemas on 7 June.