The trend of turning Batman and everything around him increasingly darker, which began with Keaton’s Batman, has reached its logical culmination in The Batman. Robert Pattinson is absolutely tremendous, vanishing completely into the role and giving a version of the character that is both familiar and unique.

Directed and co-written by Matt Reeves, The Batman has been a long time coming. It has been in development in one form or another from 2014, braving director, casting and screenwriter changes, production shutdowns, Covid-19 diagnoses, and even a death.

I watched The Batman on Friday, and wanted to let it stew in my mind for a couple of days to eliminate or at least minimise the recency bias I tend to have with Bat-movies. Nope, I still genuinely believe this is the finest Batman movie about Batman, instead of a film that just happens to have him in it.

A dark, beautiful, and visceral detective thriller with noirish style, imagery, and influences, The Batman is as much a superhero movie as The Green Mile was a prison movie — which is to say, not very much. Its hero does not have any special abilities beyond money, gadgets and expertise at physical combat. The main ‘supervillain’, a new version of the often cartoonish Riddler (played by Paul Dano), is essentially a serial killer in the vein of the Zodiac Killer, similarly confounding his pursuers with clues, ciphers, and puzzles.

The trend of turning Batman and everything around him increasingly darker, which began with Keaton’s Batman in the 80s, has reached its logical culmination. Gotham City in The Batman is a living, breathing character in itself. A dingy, rain-soaked, decaying metropolis, grotesque in an almost Lovecraftian way, it has been depicted by cinematographer Grieg Fraser (who wowed us with an opposite style in Dune not long ago) in stunning, stark colours — lurid orange on black, for instance. It’s lovely with a grim beauty of its own,  only quite daunting. A place you would wish to know more about, but from a safe distance. The film does not show Arkham Asylum, but it appears it would likely be a haunted mansion with gibbering demons as its inmates.

Although heavily stylised, Gotham feels real and lived-in. It is easy to accept the claim that the law enforcement exists merely on paper, and cops are either helpless or paid off by the underworld. Thugs have infested its street and it is essentially ruled by the mob.

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The criminal elements of Gotham are, however, afraid to go out at night, because the Batman also operates in the dark. The way Reeves and Fraser introduce Battinson is more akin to a boogeyman in a full-fledged horror movie than a hero. More than most who have tackled the character, Reeves knows exactly what makes him so terrifying to criminals. We know he is just a man who dresses up as a bat, but for the more nefarious residents of Gotham, he is a myth, a phantom lurking in the dark, a symbol of a city that has had enough and is fighting back with a vengeance. Even the Batmobile emerges out of the shadows like an elemental monster, leading to one of the most riveting car chase scenes since The Dark Knight.

Robert Pattinson earned his spurs by playing psychologically complex, driven characters in indie movies, cementing his status as a versatile, all round brilliant actor. It’s like throughout his career he’s been working towards the Batman. Because in the cape and cowl, he is absolutely tremendous, vanishing completely into the role and giving a version of the character that is both familiar and unique. His physicality, mannerisms, and even the way he uses his fearsome appearance to quietly intimidate people is, well, classic Batman.

But without the costume, Bruce Wayne appears to be a haunted, tortured man on the verge of psychological collapse, his eyes every now and then betraying the bottled-up rage inside him. With mask removed and black makeup around his eyes, he looks like a racoon, his vulnerability palpable. Unlike the Bruce we know from, say, the Dark Knight trilogy, with all his charm and faux frivolous playboy persona, this one is dishevelled with untidy hair, mirroring the grungy quality of his city.

A clear dichotomy between the two public personas — Batman and Bruce Wayne — is missing, and might bother the purists, but this is a very personal portrayal of the character. It can be explained by the fact that this is still a Batman-in-training, and would in future develop a public persona for Bruce Wayne — or Gothamites will put two and two together and figure out his secret identity.

Batman’s most reliable ally, James Gordon, a lieutenant at this point, is played by with uncharacteristic composure by Jeffrey Wright, who should really narrate a few audiobooks in free time. The portrayal is both compelling and distinct from Gary Oldman’s always-on-edge Gordon in Nolan movies. He is also not intimidated by Batman, and amusingly, calls him ‘man’ (as in ‘whatever you want, man’), as though the superhero were his unruly partner.