The Pale Blue Eye

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.

Harry Melling uncannily takes on the mantle of the poet in the film, which the screenwriter describes as a movie motivated by questions.

The end result is a work that gives viewers “time to languish in these silent moments” that focus on character rather than just “divulging plot.” Set in Hudson Valley, New York, in 1830, “The Pale Blue Eye” focuses on a murder of a West Point cadet. “I love to cast faces,” notes Cooper of how he assembled this overwhelmingly English cast. “The Pale Blue Eye” is an intentionally contemplative, slow-burn of a film. He shares that he hoped to change audiences’ “preconceived notions about who Poe was,” transcending the “dark, brooding, and melancholy” characterizations of the man to explore him as “warm and witty and a great companion.” Harry Melling uncannily takes on the mantle of the poet in the film, which the screenwriter describes as a movie motivated by questions including, “What drives someone to madness? Cooper relished the opportunity and “dangerous” challenge of putting the popular figure of Poe on screen.

This Netflix mystery stars Christian Bale as a detective investigating a gruesome killing spree with the help of a young Edgar Allan Poe.

Bale and Melling are an outstanding double act, the cinematography is stellar, and almost every frame is a joy to look at. There is a lot to love about The Pale Blue Eye. [on the period elements](https://gamerant.com/netflix-best-period-piece-true-story-outlaw-king/) while delivering a murder mystery story that's only slightly less absurd. The remaining 20 minutes change the context of the rest of the story, making certain elements even less plausible. Without wishing to spoil, the film feels over with a satisfying conclusion 20 minutes before the credits roll. Bale imbues his central detective character with the weight and sincerity that the character needs. It takes a long time to get where it's going, and the conclusion will be too absurd to be likable to some. The murder mystery genre is back in a big way. The cast is unquestionably the draw here, and the dual leads are excellent as expected. [pacing is a bit](https://gamerant.com/house-of-the-dragon-time-jump-pacing/) of a mess, too much time is given over to Landor's tragic brooding, and some moments feel wildly out of place with the tone. [a gruesome murder rocks](https://gamerant.com/murder-mysteries-movies/) the United States Military Academy campus at West Point. The Pale Blue Eye, Scott Cooper's new addition to the canon, is a period piece in which the originator of the genre must aid in solving a compelling and completely absurd series of murders.

A broody detective (Christian Bale) teams up with Edgar Allan Poe in Netflix whodunit "The Pale Blue Eye," which ends with a jaw-dropping reveal.

And I think that's why his work affects us on a really subconscious level: It gets at the stuff of nightmares." "That very opening scene where you see Landor's character washing his hands in the stream – it turns out later that he's washing a bloody implement," Bayard says. "You see his influence everywhere," Melling says. Melling considers Poe the "godfather" of the mystery genre, inspiring everyone from horror author H.P. He's our surrogate, so the fact that he knows all along he's done it is a surprise." "This is a character who has dedicated his career to apprehending criminals and enforcing justice. "We bring certain assumptions to stories: We don't think a detective is going to be investigating his own crime. "It made sense to me why he would attach himself in such a strong way to this detective," Melling says. "In some ways, it does reinvent the idea of who Poe is," Melling says. Melling used the writer's "very nomadic, lonely existence" to help inform his relationship with the fictional Landor. But "Pale Blue Eye" subverted his expectations of the author, who died at 40 in 1849. It's the reason I chose this setting because a lot of people don't know that he was there.

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.