Raven – Film Review

Raven (Tamieka Chavis) struggles with a major life decision after her abusive husband survives a car accident and emerges a changed man while being badgered by a daughter whose blind to her father’s sins and a love interest who can’t see past his own desires.

Natasha ‘Breezy’ Malone and Frank E. Jackson Jr.‘s Raven had all of the right ingredients to become at least a decently engaging spousal drama, but instead, it’s one of the most headache-inducing films I’ve seen so far this year. Despite featuring some genuinely talented actors front and center, almost the entire movie comes across as a student project. Or like something that a college student made.

Not only is the script incredibly poor and underdeveloped (seriously, it feels like a first draft), but it also feels cheap right down to the camerawork and lighting. Look, I’m sure that Frank E. Jackson Jr. is talented with a camera, but he definitely needs some time to perfect his work. Also, that’s another thing – why is the director of this movie also the cinematographer? Trust me – that can cause a lot of problems and can actually make the filmmaking process treacherous and painful.

In all reality, they probably just couldn’t afford to hire an actual director of photography for this film so the director probably just stepped in and said, in the words of Thanos, “Fine, I’ll do it myself”. So many scenes transition to the next with incredibly different lighting techniques. One moment we will be watching two people sitting in a drab, gray room, and then the next, we’ll watch somebody in an over-saturated outdoor environment.

But even aside from all of the poor technical stuff on display here, the film just isn’t interesting whatsoever. Relationship dramas can obviously be good with the right script attached, but this was not a good script. It gives almost zero depth to any of its central characters, making it hard to even understand where anybody is coming from. And even though this film is only about an hour and thirty minutes long, it feels two times longer than that.

The pacing in Raven is unbearably slow. While watching the film, I constantly had to resist the urge to look over at my phone to simply see what time it was, praying that the film would be over soon. I don’t need to tell you that’s not a good thing. An excellent movie should effortlessly suck you into its story. When watching it, you shouldn’t feel the urge to check your phone at all. But with Raven, I truly had to resist.

Raven brandishes an extremely bland, surface-level script that doesn’t allow any of its characters to be developed in interesting ways.