The Darkest Knight Yet

T he Batman is soggy, gloomy, dank, rank, filthy, and forbidding. And so I really liked it. It’s not quite as searing or unsettling as Joker, but it pushes further in that direction than any big-budget comic-book movie yet, and after the cutesy kiddie contrivances of Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Batman is as bracing as a shot of whisky after a grape Slushee.

Director Matt Reeves, who made two first-rate Planet of the Apes movies, recreates the feel of a creepy David Fincher thriller rather than an action adventure, and for three slowly paced hours the film is mostly enthralling. The sin-signifying rain of Seven drenches Gotham City, which is also plagued by murderous ciphers that recall Zodiac and Fight Club–style thug armies of disaffected youths aching to be activated in a program of terror. I don’t think Reeves is as visually gifted as Fincher, nor does he have Christopher Nolan’s ability to choreograph action scenes, so I wouldn’t rank The Batman at the absolute pinnacle of comic-book movies, but its chilling, nightmarish quality earns it a spot at the grownups’ table. The Batman certainly can’t be dismissed as yet another meretricious superhero caper.

DC originally stood for “detective comics,” and the new Batman (played with clamped-jaw determination by Robert Pattinson) reverts to his original role as a sort of adjunct detective, working crime scenes in a depraved city that looks like New York City on some of its worst days. The lines between DC and Marvel movies have become blurred in recent years, but The Batman swerves ferociously back into alignment with what Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder were doing a decade or so ago, taking their cues from real-world angst.

Reeves seeks to disturb rather than entertain, limiting the jokey banter to a minimum and delivering only two extended action scenes, one of which isn’t even close to exhilarating or cathartic. I can picture audiences getting antsy and saying, “Where’s the fun?” as they did about Batman v. Superman, but I admired that movie’s willingness to pursue more expansive questions than the Marvel films, which always wind up being preoccupied with how to spend millions on CGI throwdowns in which villains and heroes lob chunks of scenery around.

The Batman begins two years after the man in the cowl has started his vigilante mission — “They think I’m hiding in the shadows. I am the shadows” — and has earned the trust of Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), who wields the bat signal as necessary. In an urban landscape of rot, rain, and rust, a trio of high-ranking political figures get murdered by a psycho who deploys a question-mark logo and exhibits a fondness for gruesome practical jokes: Yes, it’s the first non-campy portrayal of the Riddler, played with a leather face mask by Paul Dano to resemble the Gimp from Pulp Fiction. The performance is as creepy as having a jar of spiders set loose on your skin. I credit the way Reeves bathes the Riddler in bleary light for making him so eerie and loathsome, as though we’re stuck in the madness of The Silence of the Lambs.

Meanwhile, Batman’s interest in a fat mobster who runs a club and is nicknamed the Penguin (an utterly unrecognizable Colin Farrell) leads him to an alliance with one of the man’s waitresses, Selena Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), who is looking for a missing friend who was dating one of the politicians murdered by the Riddler. “You’ve got a lot of cats,” Batman tells Selena, in one of just a handful of dryly funny lines. The word “catwoman” isn’t used, but it doesn’t have to be.

In Bruce Wayne mode, Pattinson comes across as a haunted, slender emo rocker in a terrible haircut rather than a rakish playboy. He is deliberately trying to play the character without the usual raised eyebrow, executing a sharp turn away from how Christian Bale played the role. Since Bale was perfect, however, Pattinson comes off a bit flat. It’s part of the overall design, though: The notion that Batman is more of a weirdo than a hero, and may even come from a family tainted by the all-pervasive corruption of Gotham, is critical to how Reeves (who also co-wrote the film with Peter Craig) has reshaped the character. “What is a rat with wings?” is one of the film’s riddles. Perhaps it’s a bat.

Reeves is counting on the same kind of audiences that turned out for Joker to return this time and pushes up the intensity as far as it can go in a PG-13 film, jettisoning all things smirky and larkish and making something close to a horror film. Martin Scorsese has derided comic-book movies as mere thrill rides; The Batman will make you tremble instead of cheer.