Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare's script for The Raven takes the mystery surrounding the last days of the life of author Edgar Allan Poe and spins it into a gothic murder tale.
A madman is committing a string of murders in mid-19th Century Baltimore using the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Jon Cusack) as his blueprint. At first, Poe is a suspect, but when his beloved Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve) is kidnapped by the killer, Poe becomes a consultant for eager, young detective Fields (Luke Evans).
Poe is drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as the killer challenges the author to document their mental duel through the newspaper as he leads the police along a trail of breadcrumbs towards the location of the missing woman.
It's a fascinating, convoluted tale and Cusack shines as the depressed, alcoholic rapscallion and romantic, but ultimately he is more interesting when Edgar is just being Edgar rather than his later manifestation as an "action hero".
The story does a great job of obfuscating the identity of the killer, but never explains the "how" of his elaborate - and presumably costly - murders.
His Saw-like "Pit And The Pendulum" killing, for instance, clearly wasn't something just thrown together on a whim, but the film never even touches on how the killer purchased the necessary equipment and assembled it all without attracting any attention.
It's probably worth noting that The Raven is by no means a horror movie, despite some moments of moderate gore, but rather a procedural, detective piece with Poe and Fields putting the clues together and tracking down their quarry before he kills Miss Hamilton.
As with many period-pieces these days, The Raven's atmosphere ultimately triumphs over the story (why introduce Poe's pet mongoose, for instance, only for it to have nothing to do with the story and be just as quickly forgotten about?), but the plot - if a tad far-fetched and anachronistic - still makes for an entertaining hour-and-three-quarters.
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