Review: The Pale Blue Eye

Image courtesy of Netflix.

 

Scott Cooper's "The Pale Blue Eye" is a chilly period piece whodunit with a historical hook that provides a fictional origin story about a famous figure - in this case, Gothic short story writer Edgar Allen Poe (played here with flair by Harry Melling). The picture involves a series of murders during the 1830s at the West Point Military Academy in upstate New York, where Poe was actually once a cadet before dropping out to pursue his writing career.

As the film opens, another cadet is found hanged - however, his heart has been removed from his chest and has not been located, making the incident seem more like a crime than a suicide. It just so happens that a renowned detective named Landor (Christian Bale) lives near West Point's property, and he is called upon by academy bigwigs (Timothy Spall and Simon McBurney) to get involved in the case.

Landor has his own checkered past - he was a former New York City constable who was known for breaking major cases and, as Poe at one point puts it, was once able to solve a case merely with a piercing glance, but his life seemingly fell apart after losing his wife and after his daughter ran away. Now, he lives alone and mostly seems to want to be left alone.

But he takes the case. As he makes his way through the cadets, interrogating them, he chances upon Poe, who has macabre theories of his own regarding who might have committed the murder and why. Soon, Landor enlists Poe to secretly aid in the investigation by infiltrating a group of students led by a popular cadet, whose father is the academy's doctor (Toby Jones).

"The Pale Blue Eye" is visually stylish, and Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography utilizes the bleak winter settings to the fullest extent. Characters creep around in foggy environs, the chilly overhead shots add to the isolating effect of the locations, and the film's endless wintery imagery goes a long way in the atmosphere department.

There are plenty of plot twists in the film - some good, others a little less effective - but this is a well-crafted potboiler. Bale provides just enough world weariness for Landor, but his is a surprisingly unshowy performance. Rather, it's Melling - who was so good as the poem-reciting man with no arms or legs in the Coen Brothers' "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" - who gets to cut loose as Poe, from the drawling affectations in his speech to a bawdy poetry reading.

Cooper's films are often set in visually depressive locations - "Out of the Furnace" or "Antlers," for example - and Bale is a frequent collaborator (their best work together is the violent western "Hostiles"). "The Pale Blue Eye" - which, of course, takes its title from Poe's poem "Lenore" - checks both of those boxes. As a piece of speculative fiction, it's pretty fun, and there's a final twist I doubt most will see coming. It honors the great writer by crafting the type of sinister story that he himself might have written on a cold, snowy night.