The Pale Blue Eye

It's murder at West Point where a young Edgar Allen Poe is a cadet (for real) and the atmosphere is shrouded in mystery and madness. That alone makes "The ...

The great Robert Duvall also shows up as Jean Pepe, an occult expert brought in to investigate a rash of satanic rituals at the Point. There's a hint of suspense when Lea's macho cadet brother Artemus (Harry Lawtey) gets drawn into the case. The time is 1830 and Landor is still mourning the death of his wife and the disappearance of his daughter. What a shame that writer-director Scott Cooper ("Crazy Heart") so utterly fails to build dramatic momentum. To help him break the code of silence among cadets, Landor enlists Poe, who only had a few poems published at the time. There's nothing like a brutal murder or two to connect this pair of obsessives.

The Pale Blue Eye movie review: A gothic mystery that not only owes a great creative debt to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe but also features him as a ...

The only time that Cooper displays any sort of levity in this movie is in his direction of Melling. The supporting cast is filled out by excellent character actors such as Tobey Jones, who plays the coroner; Simon McBurney, who plays a captain; and Timothy Spall, who drops by as the captain’s superior. Landor is described in a convenient early exposition dump as a widower who is particularly adept at ‘gloveless interrogations’. He’s someone who doesn’t take things at face value, which makes him a fun foil to the rather austere Augustus. This, by the way, happens an hour after Robert Duvall has dropped by as a tattooed puzzle solver named Jean-Pepe who studies the occult in his spare time. In fact, he’s spent the entirety of his directorial career making grim dramas — three of which have now starred

The impressionistic tale of a young Edgar Allan Poe may not be based in fact, but it captures the essence of the young writer.

Yet bringing them together in this way tips The Pale Blue Eye into ludicrous, overlong melodrama. Henry Melling – known to viewers as Dudley Dursey of the The acting, which is mainly excellent, becomes hammy. As more murders ensue, the mystery deepens. Auguste Dupin (whose name Bale’s Augustus Landor partially evokes). The body is found hanging from a tree by the banks of the Hudson. His rib cage has been surgically ripped open and the heart removed. [cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s](https://variety.com/2012/film/news/takayanagi-japanese-transplant-captures-extreme-conditions-1118049919/) evocative palette, where the pale blue cloaks of the West Point cadets contrast with the monochrome winter setting. The specific image of a pale blue eye is evoked by the seductive Lea Marquis’s (Lucy Boynton) eyes and the “piercing look” of detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale). [crop up repeatedly](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/439628) in Poe’s work: [occult ritual and cryptograms](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-cipher-from-poe-solved/), the border between sanity and insanity, the image of the [beautiful dead woman](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=090diHhmp40C&printsec=front_cover&redir_esc=) – which Poe notoriously described as “the most poetical topic in the world”. [The Tell-Tale Heart](https://poemuseum.org/the-tell-tale-heart/), the story of a man so disturbed by a lodging house mate’s pale blue “vulture eye” that he kills him and dismembers his body so he can hide it under the floorboards. [Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe's writings to solve the mystery of his death](https://theconversation.com/depression-and-language-analysing-edgar-allan-poes-writings-to-solve-the-mystery-of-his-death-131421)

The military summons Christian Bale's veteran detective Augustus Landor to solve the crime. Also at the academy as a cadet is Harry Melling's young Edgar Allan ...

One cannot get enough books, the other wants to have nothing to do with them. It wouldn't have changed naught else in the story. In such mysteries, the elements are one of the characters, and Cooper and Takayanagi recognise that. The corpse of a cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York has been found hanged, and later at the mortuary its heart is ripped out with the precision of a surgeon. The only out-there thing about it is Poe himself. Soon enough, another cadet is found brutally murdered in the nearby woods, his heart too carved out from his chest—though, this time the procedure appears cruder.

'A film shouldn't be like an enema,' says writer-director Scott Cooper. Here's how he and frequent collaborator Christian Bale stretched its suspense.

“We wanted it to feel bare, unforgiving and brutal, with a very narrow color palette, almost shooting the film in black and white,” Cooper says. “It was a brutal shoot,” Cooper says. “It made it memorable,” recalls Bale. “Somebody as intense and masculine as Landor is realizing that he’s missed a great deal in assuming that he has time,” Bale says. “He approached him as someone warm, witty and humorous, prone to poetic and romantic flourishes, looking for a connection.” “So lifelike that I would look over at one of the actors looking at his cadaver, and you could see them having an unsettling out-of-body experience. “And Christian is on that ledge with me [to] explore the darker corners of the human psyche.” “When I started to look at his work with more intention, it was a surprise [to discover] how much he has infiltrated culture and my brain without me even knowing that it was him doing so. Cooper has been contemplating the chief questions of “The Pale Blue Eye” since reading it after directing his first film, The gentle yet opinionated loner — not the “Master of the Macabre” just yet — teams up with Landor for the investigation. To become legendary, you have to be a keen, invisible observer and not be a part of the story, which Christian did beautifully.” Transport the audience somewhere, “The Pale Blue Eye” does.

Filmmaker Scott Cooper's latest is a gothic thriller about a grizzled detective (Bale) and the young poet investigating a series of brutal killings.

His movies are more coherent for their actorly musculature than for ins and outs and of the stories he tells, and The Pale Blue Eye is no different. The actor starred in Cooper’s Out of the Furnace (2013) and Hostiles (2017). The offense is that it does so in service of a mystery that barely matters. So it’s up to the rest of this dreary set to get our minds going, a job that they only barely get to do, in a movie that does not always seem confident in how and whether it aims to please us. The Pale Blue Eye, written and directed by Scott Cooper and based on the 2003 Louis Bayard novel of the same name, is only ostensibly a movie about a mystery. If he weren’t Edgar Allan Poe, he’d seem like a plant: a character whose strangeness is meant to attract our suspicion, to the benefit of the more obvious crook drifting somewhere in the shadows, pulling the strings. Well, and maybe for the pleasure of his hifalutin drawl, the general Old South essence of his company, which stands out as exotic in the Hudson Valley and has accordingly made him a target among his peers. Really, it’s a movie fixated on the spindly strangeness of the poet somewhat at its center, who’s only recruited into Landor’s company, at first, for the sake of his gothic instincts. And he’s seen enough death, one presumes, that the spookiness of this endeavor, wherein the body count is sure to increase, probably won’t get to him. That means he’s perfect for the job: he has no one and nothing to lose. The coroner and others will eventually discover that the man’s heart has been stolen from his chest and a portion of a note, yet to be deciphered, has been hidden away, clutched in the dead man’s hardened grip. It’s 1830 on the snowy New York campus of the United States Military Academy and a young cadet has been found hanged.

Directed by Scott Cooper and starring Academy Award winner Christian Bale, the Netflix gothic thriller The Pale Blue Eye begins streaming today – and the ...

Sadly, The Pale Blue Eye has been faced with some criticism. “The Pale Blue Eye intrigues with fascinating character dynamics and occult themes. A solidly built mystery, The Pale Blue Eye crumbles in the underwhelming third act, which doesn’t deliver a resolution that fits the complexity of the crime presented. The narrative eventually stumbles with pacing issues and a perplexing, twist-laden third act. [Christian Bale](https://movieweb.com/person/christian-bale/), the Netflix gothic thriller [The Pale Blue Eye](https://movieweb.com/movie/the-pale-blue-eye/) begins streaming today – and the reviews are now in. So, is The Pale Blue Eye and its central murder mystery worth a watch?

John Fetterman officially became the 54th senator in Pennsylvania history this week. But courtesy of Netflix, he can add another job to his resume: Actor.

[ made a cameo in 2005′s Wedding Crashers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/john-mccain-dead-5-memorable-cameos-tv-shows-movies-1137309/saturday-night-live-2002/). [as Fetterman tweeted last month](https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1601282214226165760), his wife Gisele also makes a cameo in The Pale Blue Eye. ... That’s a face that fits in the 1830s.’” She is possibly in the background of one scene in the same tavern about 45 minutes after Fetterman appears, though if it’s her, the background is too out of focus to conclusively tell. After all, looking for a senator in the film already broke the fourth wall plenty for us. We clocked him in one scene early in the film, when Bale’s character goes to a tavern after starting his murder investigation.

Harry Melling plays a fictional take on lit legend Edgar Allan Poe.

The performances are uniformly strong, everyone but Bale – he’s the voice of calm, collected reason here, remember – elevating their line readings to a level of entertaining exaggeration (Anderson pegs over the eyeroll-o-meter with an over-the-top mannerisms). [Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter](https://decider.com/movie/abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter/), but it’s sort of in the same ballpark. Performance Worth Watching: Christian Bale does what he does best: Maintains a rock-solid foundation for the movie, and capably adds some flavor to a script thin on character. Also in line with Cooper’s filmography, The Pale Blue Eye seems a bit too content to go through the motions narratively. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones) and his family: son Artemus (Harry Lawtey), a cadet; daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton), an ailing waif; and his wife Julia (Gillian Anderson), something of a kook. “No drinking,” is the warning, and a few beats later, he walks into the local tavern for a sip. He offers Poe a job that will earn him no money or recognition and will endear him to no one. A contusion on the back of his head. A little annoying, a little heavy-handed with the look-ma-I’m-a-poet shit, a little too keen on flaunting his eccentricities, but he’s a true weirdo who isn’t at all a military bro marinating in a damp cloud of his own machismo farts. [The Pale Blue Eye](https://decider.com/movie/the-pale-blue-eye/), a 19th-century detective story that’s just as gloomy and somber as their previous films, blue-collar crime-drama [Out of the Furnace](https://decider.com/movie/out-of-the-furnace/) and gritty Western [Hostiles](https://decider.com/movie/hostiles-2017/). A student, a soldier-to-be. [THE PALE BLUE EYE](https://decider.com/movie/the-pale-blue-eye/): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Movie review: Christian Bale and Harry Melling star in the new atmospheric Netflix mystery The Pale Blue Eye. Veteran detective Augustus Landor and young ...

This also sets up a challenge for the movie: how to deliver a solution that not only makes sense but also honors the captivating cruelty of the crimes committed. Ultimately, it’s all pretty gripping, not just because of Bale and Melling and the heady atmosphere but because the crimes being investigated are savage on a downright existential level. (Is he the only American in the cast? Robert Duvall (!!!) plays a professor of the occult. We’re dealing with a fundamentally cozy genre, however, and familiarity is allowed and encouraged. (In real life, Poe lasted only a few months at the school.) You also sense, in his mannerisms and speech, that this is a man who will either make his mark on the world or end up dead in a ditch. When Poe visits Landor’s house and admires books that were clearly his daughter’s, we start to understand why the older man has softened around this misfit poet-cadet: The young man reminds him of his lost daughter. This father-son dynamic powers the whole picture and sets up several key moments in the film’s climax. “To remove a man’s heart is to traffic in symbol. Those of us for whom Sherlock Holmes served as a gateway drug into serious literature can testify to this: The Victoriana, the cobblestones and gaslight, all were just as essential as the cases themselves to our fascination, maybe more so. Landor has lost his wife to illness, and his daughter, we’re told, recently ran away from home; he came to these woods to find happiness with his family and wound up alone and embittered. “The heart is a symbol, or it is nothing,” Poe explains.

How do Landor and Poe solve the mystery? ( ...

After learning of Ballinger’s involvement from Fry’s diary, Landor killed and mutilated him in the same way to make the murders appear ritualistic. Landor confesses that his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson), didn’t actually run away, but was raped by three assailants on her way home from the academy ball two years earlier and later jumped off a cliff to her death. Lea drugs Poe and, with the help of Artemus and their mother Julia (Gillian Anderson), prepares to cut out his heart and sacrifice him. After finding an officer’s jacket that links Artemus to the scene of Fry’s heart abduction, Landor works out that the Marquis family attempted an occult ritual involving the sacrifice of a human heart to try to prolong Lea’s life—and it worked. “I knew that from the moment I first met you, and here we are.” Mattie came away from the assault holding Fry’s dog tag, leading Landor to seek revenge on Fry following her suicide. Landor manages to pull Poe and Julia to safety, but Lea and Artemus are crushed and killed by falling debris. The diary reveals that Fry and Ballinger were close friends, and, soon after, it’s discovered that their other friend, Cadet Stoddard (Joey Brooks), appears to have run off. The cadet, Leroy Fry (Steven Meier), was hanged and, in an even more disturbing turn of events, had his heart cut out and stolen while his body sat inside the school’s hospital. While The Pale Blue Eye is a work of fiction, the real-life Poe did in fact attend West Point before being Lea suffers from a seizure disorder and has been given only a few months to live. And it’s a doozy of a whodunnit.

The Netflix release, mystery thriller film "The Pale Blue Eye," has the whole gothic touch and aesthetic in its visuals. The plot, concerning an ...

When Landor committed the second murder of Ballinger, he knew that he had to copy the heart extraction in order to tie it to the first murder. The man then visits the cliff from which Mathilde had jumped, and in an ultimate farewell, he lets go of a ribbon belonging to his daughter, which he had dearly held on to till now. Landor directly confronts Poe about this suspicion, and the latter reveals that he was the subject of ridicule for both the cadets, along with many others in the Academy, due to his unusual appearance, stature, and personality. At present, Lea had convinced Edgar Poe to be a part of this ritual, in which he would be killed in order to help his beloved, and the ritual was about to begin. Landor reports to the authorities that it was Artemus who had killed the two cadets and also the animals in between and had carved out all their hearts to use in his supernatural ritual. From his conversation with the guard, the detective figures out that someone wearing a captain’s coat had pretended to be a captain and relieved the guard of his duty so that the perpetrator could enter the empty ward. The detective focuses on trying to find out more about the common friends of the dead cadets and also about any names on the campus who have an interest in black magic, and both lead him to a single man and his family. A return to the hospital ward and a re-examination of the dead body confirms this suspicion—cadet Fry had not hanged himself to death but had been killed by someone in this horrific manner. But what is more concerning and gruesome is the fact that although the body was found soon after and had been brought to the hospital ward, it had been mutilated by someone in the middle of the night. Landor visits the icehouse and spots an important clue: a circle and a triangle have been drawn on the floor, along with candles and blood placed in patterns. Landor also finds out that the man supposed to be on duty guarding the dead body in the hospital ward the previous night had been relieved of his duty by some higher official. To the doctor and the rest of the authorities at the place, this death is a definite suicide, as Fry was found dead by asphyxiation.

When a West Point cadet is discovered dead in 1830 and his heart is later carved out of his chest, military leaders of the academy ask Detective Augustus Landor ...

Landor not only killed Fry, but he was summoned to West Point to solve the mystery he created. Poe has all the information he needs to turn Landor in. He left Poe with the note from Fry’s hand (which was assumed to be from Lea). But Poe noticed that the handwriting on the note matches a note that Landor once wrote to him. When Landor rushes in to stop them, Lea knocks over a candle, and fire overtakes the room. Seeing promise in one of the academy’s own, Landor enlists a young cadet for help: the poet Edgar Allan Poe (Henry Melling).

Augustus Landor is a fictional creation from Bayard's novel and now Cooper's movie. His last name comes from Poe's short story, “Landor's Cottage.” Originally ...

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is the first murder mystery based on the details of a real crime. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin calls Vidocq “a good guesser.” In the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), Holmes similarly dismisses the French detective’s fictional adaptation. It is fun to imagine the writer similarly going along on the case as the unnamed narrator in the short stories. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is also the first “locked room” mystery. In the film The Pale Blue Eye, it is young Edgar who eagerly helps the eccentric but brilliant detective probing the academy murders. He has no professional stake in their solution, it is a favor to him to pass the time. Auguste Dupin is the master analyst in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” which was published in three installments in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion, beginning in late 1842, and “The Purloined Letter,” published in 1844. That generation of readers was among the first to be made to feel actively part of the reported happenings of the day. There is nothing in the room but two bags of gold coins, torn hair, and the blade, still covered in blood. The Edgars, the most prestigious award of the Mystery Writers of America, is named in his honor. A mother and daughter are found dead in the sealed space deemed to be the crime scene. His last name comes from Poe’s short story, “Landor’s Cottage.” Originally published in 1849, it is a descriptive work, without mystery or violence, that works as a contemplative rest stop for the retired detective’s dwelling in The Pale Blue Eye.