The Pale Blue Eye

Christian Bale met Scott Cooper on the set of Hostiles in 2017, and the two men spent the next several years looking for something to do together. What they landed on was an 1830 murder mystery set at West Point, adapted from Louis Bayard's 2003 novel, with a young Edgar Allan Poe as the detective's unlikely sidekick. Bale signed on to play Augustus Landor and also took a producer credit. Cooper wrote and directed. Netflix released the finished film on December 23, 2022, after a limited theatrical run that began on December 22.

The cast Cooper assembled reads like a roll call of character actors from both sides of the Atlantic. Toby Jones plays the academy physician, Gillian Anderson his wife, Timothy Spall the superintendent, Simon McBurney a skeptical captain, and Robert Duvall, in his first Netflix film, a cantankerous local named Jean-Pepe. Harry Melling, best known for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter series, took the role of Poe and lost a noticeable amount of weight to play the impoverished cadet. Lucy Boynton plays Lea Marquis, the doctor's daughter, who becomes entangled in the investigation.

Reviews split down the middle. The production design, Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography, and Howard Shore's score drew consistent praise. The third-act plotting drew consistent complaints. Rotten Tomatoes settled at 56 percent from critics against a 73 percent audience score, and the film spent several weeks in Netflix's global top ten. It is a slow, cold, deliberate movie, and it knows exactly what it is. [edit]

A cadet named Leroy Fry is found hanging from a tree at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 1830. When the body is cut down, the attending surgeon discovers the heart has been cut out of the chest with a precision no ordinary killer could manage. The superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer, has a scandal on his hands and a school full of restless cadets. He sends for Augustus Landor, a former New York City constable who lives nearby and has a reputation for discretion.

Landor arrives at a frozen campus where the cold is a character in its own right. He interviews the dead boy's roommate, questions the surgeon, and walks the grounds. The autopsy notes bother him. So does the fact that Fry was hanged before his heart was removed, which suggests the killer wanted the body found. Landor suspects a ritual, or a message, or both. Thayer wants the matter closed quietly. Landor tells him that will not be possible.

At the academy, Landor meets a cadet named Edgar Allan Poe, a wiry, theatrical young man from Virginia who writes poetry, drinks too much, and has already made enemies of his classmates. Poe volunteers information about Fry's last days and, more usefully, about the secret societies that operate inside the corps. Landor is skeptical of the boy at first. Then Poe produces a detail no one else noticed, and Landor takes him on as an assistant. The two make an odd pair: the older man grim and watchful, the younger one eager to turn every clue into a verse.

A second body turns up. Cadet Randolph Ballinger, who had been missing, is found in a similar condition. The pattern is now unmistakable. Someone inside or near the academy is killing cadets and taking their hearts, and the killings appear tied to an old legend about a pale blue eye, a phrase that turns up in a scrap of paper Poe finds in Ballinger's quarters. Landor traces the phrase through local folklore and through the Marquis family, whose patriarch, Dr. Daniel Marquis, teaches at the academy and whose household includes his wife Julia, his daughter Lea, and his son Artemus.

Lea Marquis is ill, or claims to be, and spends much of her time indoors. She and Landor form a wary friendship. She tells him about her brother, who is strange and secretive, and about her mother's death, which she does not discuss in detail. Landor also meets Jean-Pepe, a tavern keeper and sometime smuggler who knows the local woods and the local graves. Jean-Pepe's information is unreliable but not useless, and it points Landor toward the Marquis property.

Poe, meanwhile, falls for Lea. The romance is brief and doomed, but it gives the investigation an emotional center it otherwise lacks. Landor warns Poe to keep his distance from the family. Poe does not listen. He snoops, he charms, he drinks, and he gets himself confined to quarters more than once. Landor's patience wears thin, then recovers, because Poe keeps producing results.

The investigation turns up a hidden room, a set of surgical instruments, and a connection to a body snatching ring that supplies cadavers to medical schools. Landor begins to suspect that the murders are not the work of a single madman but of a group protecting something. He interviews the Marquis household again. Dr. Marquis is calm and helpful. Artemus is not. Lea is frightened, and her fear seems directed at her own family.

By this point Landor has learned that his own past is not as buried as he thought. He lost a daughter years earlier, and the loss broke something in him that he has never repaired. The case has pulled him back toward that grief. Poe notices, and says so, and Landor does not deny it. The two men are both haunted, in different registers, and the winter closes in around them as the academy prepares for Christmas.

Landor assembles the pieces: the surgical skill, the ritual language, the family secrets, the bodies. He believes he knows who is responsible, and he believes the answer will cost him something. Poe believes the answer is supernatural. Landor tells him it never is. The film moves toward a confrontation that will settle the question, and the truth, when it arrives, is worse than either of them expected.[edit]