The Raven James McTeigue The story: A serial killer is recreating the gruesome murders from the fevered imagination of 19th-century writer Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack). The stakes are raised even higher when Poe’s beloved Emily (Alice Eve) gets abducted. Racing against time, he works with Detective Fields (Luke Evans) to hunt down the mastermind. The title is a reference to Poe’s narrative poem of the same name in which a man, in despair over the loss of his lover, slowly descends into madness. Actor John Cusack has clearly been watching Sherlock Holmes. Not the BBC’s small-screen adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch as the arrogant and coolly cerebral detective but the splashier big-screen adaptations from Guy Ritchie in which Robert Downey Jr plays the crime-solver with a kind of manic energy that flirts with parody. So we get Cusack channelling the showier performance when one might expect a more morose and brooding Poe, say, one along the lines of Michael Fassbender’s Edward Fairfax Rochester in Jane Eyre (2011). This is Poe then, as the film imagines, in his last days – out of ideas and numbing himself with drink. And also improbably in love. The bigger problem is that one finds it hard to buy Cusack as someone from the Victorian era the moment he opens his mouth. Cusack as a hitman in the dark comedy Grosse Point Blank (1997)? Sure. Cusack as a lovelorn record store owner in High Fidelity (2000)? Absolutely. There is something so undeniably contemporary about his speech that it would take a great leap of faith to accept him as Poe. In contrast, the square-jawed and muttonchopped Luke Evans (Immortals, 2011) is perfectly at home in the movie’s setting, while the lovely Alice Eve gamely makes the most of her role as the spirited and spunky Emily. Miscasting aside, there is some thrill in following the macabre mystery as it unfolds. It is like a twisted treasure hunt in which one clue leads to the next except that here, the clues are found on the murder victims and point the way to the next body. Frustratingly, the slippery perpetrator is always just one step ahead and manages to elude the grasp of the police each time. The big reveal, like Cusack’s performance, falls a little short. Stretching oneself is all well and good but should the 45-year-old actor attempt another period piece when modernity clings to him with every word he speaks? As Poe himself had written so succinctly: “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’.” (ST)