The Witch — They Believed in God, but Not in Their Daughter

This review contains spoilers and reflects my personal interpretation of the film.

"I am vengeance."

Bruce Wayne says those words as though they are a name.

Not a mission. Not a warning. A name.

In Matt Reeves’s The Batman, Bruce is only two years into his campaign against Gotham’s criminals. He has not yet become the composed strategist, public philanthropist, or near-mythological hero familiar from other versions of the character. He is angry, isolated, physically reckless, and almost entirely consumed by the nocturnal identity he has created.

He believes fear is a tool.

He has not yet asked what fear is building.

That question separates The Batman from many superhero origin stories. The film does not show Bruce deciding to put on the mask. It shows him discovering that putting on the mask was never enough.

He begins as an embodiment of trauma.

He ends by taking one uncertain step toward hope.

A City Behind a Mask

“Unmask the truth” is more than a promotional phrase. It describes the structure of the film.

Gotham is a city of masks.

Its politicians speak about renewal while stealing from the people they claim to serve. Its police protect institutions already contaminated by organized crime. Thomas Wayne’s reputation conceals compromise and desperation. Carmine Falcone presents himself as a respectable businessman while operating as the city’s hidden ruler.

Bruce and Edward Nashton also hide behind masks, but for different reasons.

Bruce’s trauma takes physical form as Batman. Strangely, the mask does not hide his real identity as much as it releases it. Bruce Wayne, the reclusive billionaire, appears to be the performance. Batman is the person he believes himself to be.

Edward Nashton experiences the opposite transformation. Before the mask, he considers himself a nobody—an invisible orphan abandoned by the same city that publicly mourned Bruce Wayne. As the Riddler, he gains a voice, an audience, and a sense of historical purpose.

Bruce wears a mask to become the wound he already carries.

Edward wears one to become someone the world cannot ignore.

This distinction makes them reflections rather than simple opposites.

Both are orphans. Both watch Gotham from above. Both consider conventional law incapable of confronting the city’s corruption. Both turn fear into theater. Both believe violence can reveal truth.

Most dangerously, both believe they are working together.

Two Men in the Same Darkness

The film introduces Batman and the Riddler in almost parallel ways.

Both emerge from darkness. Both observe before striking. Both transform their arrival into a performance meant to terrify an audience.

But the violence serves different purposes.

The Riddler kills in order to punish, expose, and humiliate. His victims are not merely removed; they are staged. Their deaths become messages addressed to Gotham and, eventually, to Batman.

Bruce also uses violence, and the film never pretends otherwise. He does not simply arrest criminals. He attacks them with a rage that often appears personal. Yet some boundary remains. His violence is meant to interrupt harm rather than complete an execution.

That distinction is morally important, but it is not yet enough to make him a hero.

Bruce initially cares more about what criminals feel when they see the signal than what ordinary people feel when they see him. In the opening, a frightened civilian recoils from Batman even after being rescued. To Gotham’s vulnerable, he can look like another masked man emerging from the night.

The Riddler recognizes this resemblance before Bruce does.

When Edward imagines that he and Batman have been partners, the revelation horrifies Bruce because it exposes something true beneath the delusion. The Riddler has interpreted Batman’s rage as permission.

Bruce wanted to inspire fear in criminals.

He failed to consider who might be inspired by the vengeance itself.

The most devastating moment is not one of the Riddler’s puzzles. It comes when one of his followers is unmasked and repeats Batman’s own declaration:

“I’m vengeance.”

At that moment, Bruce hears his identity spoken by the man he has become desperate not to resemble.

The Orphan in the Tower

The Riddler’s hatred of Bruce Wayne is more complex than ordinary jealousy.

Bruce lost his parents and grew up in a tower, protected by wealth, memory, and public sympathy. Edward and the other children in Gotham’s orphanage endured neglect while funds promised through Thomas Wayne’s renewal program were consumed by corruption.

To Edward, Bruce represents a city that recognizes some forms of suffering and ignores others.

The distinction is brutal. Both boys lost their parents, but only one loss became part of Gotham’s mythology. Bruce was called an orphan while remaining surrounded by material security. Edward’s suffering took place among cold rooms, addiction, hunger, and rats, invisible to the city outside.

The Riddler’s anger therefore begins with a legitimate perception: Gotham’s public story is a lie.

His moral collapse comes from believing that recognizing injustice gives him the right to decide who deserves to die.

This is also the truth Bruce must confront. He has spent two years beating the symptoms of Gotham’s sickness without understanding the structures that created them. He knows the city’s alleys better than he knows what happened to his family’s money.

For a film centered on the world’s greatest detective, Bruce is often a step behind. He solves riddles but repeatedly misses their full meaning. He mistakes a tool for a bird, misunderstands the importance of the carpet tucker, and fails to see the Riddler’s final plan until Gotham is already flooding.

That imperfection is frustrating, but appropriate.

This is not Batman at the height of his intelligence.

It is Batman learning that observation without self-knowledge is incomplete.

A Hero Still Under Construction

The physical design of this Batman reinforces his immaturity.

The suit looks handmade rather than inherited from a perfect military laboratory. Damage remains visible across the armor. His tools are practical but inelegant. His wing suit works, but his escape from police headquarters ends in a violent collision with the street.

Even the Batmobile feels less like a polished fantasy vehicle than an engine built in anger. Its exposed machinery and thunderous arrival make it seem like another creature emerging from Gotham’s industrial darkness.

Four practical Batmobile vehicles were reportedly built for the production, while the chase was designed around real stunt work supplemented by visual effects. That practical weight is essential to the scene: the machine feels dangerous because it appears capable of injuring its driver as easily as its target.

The fighting follows the same philosophy. Bruce is powerful but not graceful. He absorbs blows, loses control, and sometimes continues attacking after the threat has already fallen. The action does not present a master operating at perfect efficiency. It presents a young man using armor to survive his own recklessness.

The film’s darkness serves more than atmosphere. Cinematographer Greig Fraser and Reeves designed Gotham around obscured spaces, practical light sources, rain, and degraded texture. Fraser has discussed the challenge of preserving information in extremely dark images while keeping the audience inside Batman’s subjective experience.

One of the film’s most striking action passages takes that idea to its extreme. In a nearly black corridor, gunfire briefly illuminates Batman’s movement. He does not appear continuously. He exists in fragments—armor, impact, silhouette—created by muzzle flashes.

He is not hiding in the shadows.

For a few seconds, he seems to be the shadows.

Too Much Truth

The film’s density is also one of its weaknesses.

Falcone, Maroni, the renewal fund, the Wayne family, the orphanage, Selina’s parentage, Annika’s disappearance, the police conspiracy, the Riddler’s puzzles, Bruce’s family history, and the final terrorist attack are packed into a film that runs close to three hours.

The accumulation gives Gotham a convincingly corrupt history, but it can also make the mystery feel over-engineered. The audience is not always invited to solve the case alongside Batman. Often, new information simply reveals another layer behind the previous one.

The result is less a tightly constructed detective puzzle than an atmosphere-heavy conspiracy investigation.

This does not make the film boring, but it does make it exhausting. A leaner narrative might have given more emotional weight to Bruce’s transformation and to Selina’s search for Annika. The final attack by the Riddler’s followers is thematically necessary, yet it also feels somewhat detached from the noir investigation that dominates the first two acts.

The film’s maximalism creates depth.

It also occasionally buries its strongest ideas beneath the weight of its own plot.

Something in the Way

Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” is an inspired choice for this Bruce Wayne.

Reeves has explained that Kurt Cobain influenced his conception of Bruce as a reclusive, self-destructive figure whose addiction is not a substance but revenge. He imagined Batman as a kind of “Batman Kurt Cobain,” a man disappearing into compulsion while the world outside struggles to understand him.

The song’s exhaustion and isolation fit the early Bruce perfectly. He drifts through Wayne Tower like a ghost and speaks about his nightly violence as if it were the only thing preventing him from disappearing.

Its return near the ending is more complicated.

By then, Bruce has recognized that vengeance alone will not save Gotham. Repeating the same song risks pulling the film back toward the emotional state it has supposedly begun to leave behind.

Yet the choice can also be understood as a refusal to declare him healed.

Bruce has changed direction, not identity.

Something is still in the way.

Into the Light

The film’s final movement gives its title meaning.

Gotham floods. Citizens are trapped beneath the arena. Batman descends from above and cuts an electrical cable, falling into the water below. The image resembles a symbolic death: vengeance disappears beneath the surface.

When he rises, he carries a red flare.

Earlier, people looked into the darkness and feared what might emerge. Now Batman enters the darkness first and creates a path for others to follow.

The transformation is simple but profound.

At the beginning of the film, the Bat-Signal warns criminals that he may be hiding somewhere in the night. At the end, the light in Batman’s hand tells frightened civilians where they can go.

He has not left the darkness.

He has changed what the darkness is for.

This is why The Batman may be one of the character’s most faithful films even when it departs from the traditional image of Bruce Wayne. It restores Batman’s identity as a detective, embraces the gothic decay of Gotham, and understands that fear is fundamental to the character.

But it also recognizes that fear cannot be his final purpose.

The film begins with a man who calls himself vengeance.

It ends with a child reaching for his hand.

Batman and the Riddler were born from the same darkness. One chose to drag the city deeper into it. The other, however imperfectly, learned to turn around.

He is still a creature of the night.

But for the first time, he is leading someone toward the light.