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.

New to Netflix today (following a brief run in select cinemas back in December) is the mystery-thriller, The Pale Blue Eye. The movie – written and directed ...

Joining Bale and Melling is a great supporting cast which includes the likes of Timothy Spall and Toby Jones, as well as the always brilliant Gillian Anderson. This film has been put together by a great team, and the results are there for all to see on screen. This journey becomes intertwined with Landor and the pair become fascinating to watch as they try and crack the case. There is a bit of backstory to Landor, which is teased early on, and this leaves room for growth throughout the picture. From the opening moments of the movie, there is a sense this is going to be an intriguing story. And then just when it appears as if this is going to be entirely Bale’s movie, the film introduces Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe, who slots in neatly alongside his co-star.

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)

'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.

It stars Christian Bale as world-weary Augustus Landor, as he travels to West Point at the behest of a local military academy after a series of grisly murders.

Speaking to Netflix, the film’s writer-director Scott Cooper explained how he saw The Pale Blue Eye as a chance to create something of an origin story for young Allen Poe. Other than that, the film is an original story based on a 2003 book of the same name by American author Louis Bayard. Edgar Allen Poe really was a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The body of a young cadet has had his heart skillfully removed, suggesting something sinister is afoot. The period mystery-thriller takes viewers back to 1830s New York as a veteran detective is hired to solve a gruesome crime. The iconic writer Poe is known as one of the worlds most influential literary figures, whose tales of the macabre have inspired countless authors and filmmakers since his death in 1849. The Pale Blue Eye is available to stream now on Netflix. Is The Pale Blue Eye based on a true story? The overwhelming majority of The Pale Blue Eye is entirely fictional, but it does have one element of truth to it. He enrolled at the age of 21 in 1830, but was there for less than a year, finding he was not suited to military life before he purposefully got himself court martialed and moved to New York City in 1831 to pursue his career as a writer. So, if the film features a real-life figure, is the rest of the story true? [Netflix](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/all-about/netflix) has already released an exciting new blockbuster, as The Pale Blue Eye dropped on the platform on Thursday (January 5).

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.

Netflix's new movie The Pale Blue Eye features Edgar Allan Poe investigating a murder, but is the Gothic thriller based on a true story?