The Pale Blue Eye review: Christian Bale gets pulpy in a horror mystery

Scott Cooper’s films technically occupy a variety of genres, but they tend to feel similar because they’re so often pulp stories teetering on the verge of tragedy, and sometimes toppling into it. 2021 Horror film AntlersThe 2015 Gangster Picture Black MassThe 2013 Family Crime Drama The Furnace is OutAll of them might be better known if they were a lot more or less fun. Their serious yet workmanlike approach to genre-friendly material makes Cooper’s new Netflix film Pale Blue Eye an immediate candidate for his best work, because it applies that same workmanlike seriousness to a premise that’s shamelessly pulpy: In 1830, a young (and fictionalized) Edgar Allan Poe helps a detective solve a murder mystery at the United States Military Academy in West Point.

It isn’t a prequel. The Raven“The 2012 John Cusack film, which also featured a fictional Poe paired with a police detective to solve several murders. Cooper is adapting an appropriately Edgar-nominated novel by Louis Bayard, and he doesn’t take the story into a winking, silly direction. Instead, he casts his frequent collaborator, professional sourpuss Christian Bale, as lonely detective August Landor, who’s summoned to West Point to investigate a disturbing mutilation following an apparent suicide; a body initially found hanging from a tree later had its heart removed by unknown parties. Landor quickly points out that it’s clearly a murder case, and agrees to find the killer. Early in his investigation, he receives a bit of advice from a young cadet named Poe (played by the Harry Potter films’ Harry Melling): “The man you’re looking for is a poet.”

Poe knows poetry, naturally. He recognizes that the symbolism of the removal of the heart after death is symbolic. In Landor, he finds a quietly kindred spirit: When he sees the detective’s well-stocked bookshelves, he’s in ecstasy. Melling — who played Harry Potter antagonist Dudley Dursley before taking on roles in projects like The Queen’s Gambit and Joel Coen’s Macbeth’s Tragedy — really does resemble photos of Poe. His Virginian accent may be a bit cartoony in typical English actor fashion, but it is part of his weird presentation.

Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix

Melling portrays Poe, a shy showoff who might be too self-aware and timid to find an enthusiastic crowd. Bale lets his natural intensity fade enough to make Landor his audience. Their odd-couple team-up develops an understated tenderness amid all the ghoulish elements that call back to Poe’s stories and poems: removed hearts, coded messages, and Poe pining over a sickly woman (Lucy Boynton).

The rest of the cast is stacked: Melling’s Harry Potter co-stars Toby Jones and Timothy Spall, along with Simon McBurney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, and in a tiny part, Robert Duvall. All the big names provide more color than truly memorable scenes, though: In some cases, they’re mere accessories to their characters’ elaborate beards and hats. This is an excellent beards and hats photo. With so many distinguished older performers afoot, it can be hard to tell the younger, less weathered cadets apart, which diminishes the movie’s already sparse lineup of suspects. Will Poe himself later become a suspect, even though the audience will not for a minute believe that he’s guilty? Naturally. This movie does not ignore murder mystery traditions that Poe created.

Still, the slightly underwhelming mystery plotting and general crime-novel luridness don’t limit Pale Blue EyeBecause of their engaging leads and the wintery landscapes they live in, they are able to enjoy as much as possible. Cooper returns to rural terror, but he is still interested in it. Antlers’ viscerally damp rot. The snow of not-quite-upstate New York looks pristine in the film’s black-white-blue color palette. The atmosphere isn’t full Poe-style gothic, but there are gorgeously moody touches, like a conversation staged with two characters turned almost completely into silhouettes against the moonlight — living shadow puppets in the woods.

The movie’s focus on the remote outpost set in beautiful scenery and the investigation into the mysterious death can make it look like a Western. Either way, it’s the rare January movie that feels seasonally appropriate for the chilly post-holiday blues — a movie meant to be watched while cozying up by a fire, whether your fireplace is figurative or literal.

Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix

Cooper has some trouble still luxuriating within the positive mood that he creates. Though it’s not fair to expect a full Tim Burton work-up of this material, Pale Blue Eye doesn’t capture the twinges of madness that inform some of Poe’s most famous stories, the way some of his narrators draw the readers into their destructive obsessions. Poe in this film is more like a romantic Sherlock Holmes: an eccentric genius with a misunderstood mind capable of looking at the world as a wonderful puzzle box.

The movie doesn’t have much use for the most meta dimension to the story: the fact that the real Poe helped invent modern detective fiction. It is possible to be too focused on this idea. Cooper and Bale seem more comfortable with Landor’s brand of melancholy, informed by the absence of his wife and daughter, as well as some of the odd, unexpected pauses Bale takes in some of his line deliveries. At times, the movie feels like it’s having fun in spite of itself. So it’s perfect, in a way, that Edgar Allan Poe keeps turning up to jolt his own story back to life.

Pale Blue EyeYou can stream Netflix right now