Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee (Michael Rissi, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Charlotte Brange. Viewed at Metro 4, Santa Barbara Film Festival.

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me

This is the beginning of master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe, his poem about Annabel Lee. And this is also the beginning of the movie Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee.

Annabel Lee is the poem about a young girl that under mysterious circumstances disappeared many years ago. A young painter moves into a new town, where he’s trying to find inspiration for his art work. He finds not the inspiration he thought he would find; an unknown woman comes up to his and wants him to paint her. So he does, and discovers that the girl that disappeared many years ago looks very much alike as the girl he just painted. Who is the girl? Why did she disappear? Why has she come to meet him?

As a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, I had high expectations on the movie. I shouldn’t have had. Yes, it’s low-budget and surely you can’t expect it to meet Hollywood- standards. But the story, the acting and the framing, everything was horrible. When they could’ve at least tried to capture Poe’s dramatic, dark, serious tone, instead it’s a disaster. Rissi cuts Poe’s beautiful poem into pieces uses cheap lines that we’ve heard a thousand times before. The young painter’s most beloved possession is a framed picture of a seagull. The movie ends with him seeing the seagull sitting at the exact same spot as in the picture. Come on?

Rissi turns Annabel Lee into a PG-13 Harlequin novel. A girl tries to seduce the painter using cheap lines and everything is very predictable. It’s a thriller movie without any thrills – Rissi has clearly not understood what a thriller movie is supposed to look like. I would’ve wanted him to be creative.

The camera work is OK, still photos are shown in the beginning for some variation. Many camera angles of one thing make it easier for the audience to follow the story. A narrator with dark voice is telling us the poem as the movie continues.

Though, Rissi had a hard work since he based the film on a poem, which is probably not the easiest thing to start with. But he could’ve worked harder, put together a story that is something even close to coherent. The whole movie is set and Santa Barbara, Rissi explained a little bit about the movie before it started and thanked Santa Barbara for the incredible views that he could use in the movie. That the movie was located here in SB was probably the only thing that was enjoyable in this movie. Nice to see all the beautiful views and angles of Santa Barbara, but that was it. They should’ve made a documentary about the nature of Santa Barbara instead.