When Atmosphere Isn’t Enough

Read Time:5 Minute, 39 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait
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Genre: Horror, Thriller, Gothic
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 46m
Director(s): Adrian Langley
Writer(s): Adrian Langley, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
Cast: Michael Swatton, Pragya Shail, Paul Thomas, Simon Phillips, Louisa Capulet, Colby Frost, Mark Templin
Where to Watch: in select theaters and on digital October 10, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: EDGAR ALLAN POE’S THE OVAL PORTRAIT has the right ingredients on paper: a cursed painting, three strangers bound by a past they don’t understand, and the perfect setting—a peculiar antique shop—that practically begs for haunts, whispers, and the feeling that every object carries a memory. What it lacks is the connective tissue that makes a Gothic thriller feel alive. The mood is present, the premise is clear, and a handful of shots achieve the eerie stillness the story calls for. But the execution, especially across the ensemble, pulls attention away from the tension the film is trying to build.

The core struggle is the line delivery from several supporting players. Too many scenes feel like first passes at a table read rather than moments captured under pressure. Reactions arrive a moment late. Emotions are stated instead of felt. Exchanges that should simmer with subtext come across as stiff, as if the actors were waiting for their cues rather than living inside the moment. When a film relies on atmosphere, the slightest break in measure can destroy the mood; here, those breaks accumulate. A side character enters to advance the plot, drops information in a neutral tone, and then exits without leaving a lasting impression. The pattern repeats often enough that the shop’s sense of menace starts to feel like decoration rather than a living presence.

Dialogue compounds the problem. Instead of letting silence and suggestion do the heavy lifting, the script tries to overexplain itself. Characters describe what we can already see, or articulate feelings that would be more unsettling if they remained half-spoken. Exposition lands in tidy blocks—backstory delivered as if reading from a file rather than confessing a secret. Gothic horror thrives on implication; this film keeps translating implication into bullet points. As a result, mystery narrows instead of deepening, and scenes that could shift from curiosity to dread flatten into briefing sessions.

That’s frustrating because the premise isn’t the issue. A cursed portrait binding the fates of a thief, an artist, and a shopkeeper is a nice hook. The idea of love preserved at a terrible cost is fundamentally Poe. The production design does its part: the shop feels cramped, with narrow aisles that are just wide enough to brush shoulders with the past. There are frames where the portrait truly looks like it’s watching back. You can tell the team thought about how to trap characters in the image.

Among the leads, there are flickers of the film that this could have been. One performance finds the right key—haunted without screaming it, cautious without apathy—and that hints at a path where obsession and guilt might mix into something potent. But others in the cast often feel out of phase.

Pacing doesn’t help. Stretching Poe’s concise concept to feature length is always a high-wire act. Scenes cover the same information: someone senses the painting’s pull, someone warns or deflects, the shopkeeper suggests a half-truth, and so on. Without escalations or complications, the middle hour starts to feel like a holding pattern. The result is the opposite of what the genre needs: you begin anticipating the moments, and anticipation without uncertainty drains dread.

There are production choices that work in isolation—a practical effect—modest but tactile—yielding a better result than a digital design would have. Moments like these prove the team understands the grammar of Gothic. The missing piece is cohesion and dialogue that trusts that grammar. If a character stands in front of a cursed canvas and tells us they feel a curse, that’s information; if they simply go still and the air in the room changes, that’s cinema.

It’s worth calling out how close this comes to landing. Replace a handful of scenes with subtext; trim speeches into glances; let a secondary figure’s fear seep through their posture instead of their monologue; and the entire story tightens. The shop would feel like a trap, not a set. The portrait would feel like an accusation, not a device. Even the finale—which aims for tragic inevitability—would resonate more if the supporting ensemble had carried the dramatic weight along the way.

Had the team elevated the shopkeeper into a true moral center, rather than a plot device, or void; anchored the thief with a clear, specific want beyond survival so their choices would sting; given the artist a single, unsettling moment of creation that doesn’t speak its theme out loud. Most of all, trust silence. Gothic dread is a patient predator. It doesn’t announce every step.

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S THE OVAL PORTRAIT plays like a well-scouted location with the wrong tour guide. You can see the outlines of a stronger film in the corners—the texture of the shop, a few carefully arranged frames, an occasional close-up that hints at real obsession—yet the path the movie takes keeps stopping to explain itself. The painting may be cursed, but the words are what haunt this one—for all the wrong reasons.

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