‘The Pale Blue Eye’ stares at a 19th century whodunit
Dark tale on Netflix certainly has the whiff of an Edgar Allan Poe story: unknowable and mysterious
Writer-director Scott Cooper may be as perfect an interpreter as can be imagined for Netflix’s pulpy yet highminded adaptation of “The Pale Blue Eye, a well-received 2003 whodunit by novelist Louis Bayard about a series of grisly 1830 murders investigated by a retired police detective and his young assistant, Edgar Allan Poe. Coming off 2021’s Antlers – Cooper’s folk-horror tale adapted from a Nick Antosca short story about monsters, real and imagined – Blue Eye feels like the ideal chaser: a stylish and smart telling of what is at heart macabre malarkey.
Speaking of heart, the film gets straight down to business with the discovery of a corpse, minus that critical organ, on the campus of the US Military Academy, where some might recall the real Poe was a cadet during the year in question. When the school’s brass recruit a local legend in law enforcement to look into the crime – the brooding, damaged ex-cop Augustus “Gus” Landor – Gus almost immediately gains the assistance of Edgar, a West Point student who shares the older man’s capacity for alcohol, predilection for melancholy and fascination with criminal psychology. Played, respectively, by Christian Bale and Harry Melling, the two sleuths – a kind of American Holmes and Watson – are soon on the case, as other victims, animal and human, turn up with their hearts cut out.
Both actors are enormous fun to watch, for very different reasons. Bale, who previously worked with Cooper in Out of the Furnace and Hostiles, brings a methodical intensity to the character of Gus, who is plagued by demons, as movie detectives so often are. Edgar, on the other hand, is a morbid poet, albeit one whom Melling endows with an air that is both louche and impish. Melling’s scenery-chewing portrayal of the budding writer – and, here, amateur gumshoe – is one of the film’s chief delights. Aided by a wig and makeup, Melling also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the writer, through his portrayal avoids cliche.
In supporting roles, Toby Jones, Timothy Spall, Gillian Anderson, Charlotte Gainsbourg and an almost unrecognisable Robert Duvall, playing an expert in the occult, are all reliably entertaining.
But there is at times a sense to the film that you are watching an overdressed B-movie, especially as the plot veers more deeply into the territory of the supernatural – or at least as the workings of the world are imagined by some of the story’s more credulous characters. It has the whiff of a Poe story: unknowable and mysterious. Filtered through Bayard’s modern lens, it nevertheless retains an admirable residue of 19th-century flavour.
Where The Pale Blue Eye succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar – yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember – got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.