The Pale Blue Eye

You wait ages for one fic­tion­alised detec­tive sto­ry fea­tur­ing Edgar Allen Poe dur­ing his cadet­ship years at the Unit­ed States Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my in West Point, New York, and then two come along. Yet where Christo­pher Hatton’s Raven’s Hol­low was so deeply engaged with the super­nat­ur­al that it felt like some­thing out of the Broth­ers Grimm (or per­haps Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing), Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is root­ed in the ratio­nal (even if some of its char­ac­ters dab­ble in Satan­ic rit­u­al, and Poe him­self claims as evi­dence mes­sages sent to him in his dreams by his dear depart­ed mother).

Of course, both films are pep­pered with ravens, tell-tale hearts, gloomy ceme­ter­ies, ref­er­ences to Lenore, and oth­er pre­fig­u­ra­tions (includ­ing the detec­tive for­mat itself) of Poe’s lat­er writ­ings, as if we were wit­ness­ing the mak­ing of the man, or at least a reimag­in­ing of his for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences and inspirations.

Adapt­ed from Louis Bayard’s 2006 nov­el of the same name, The Pale Blue Eye takes place in and around the Acad­e­my itself, after the body of a Cadet has been found hang­ing from a tree, and the corpse sub­se­quent­ly des­e­crat­ed, with the heart carved from its chest. This leads Colonel Sawyer (Tim­o­thy Spall) and his sec­ond-in-com­mand Cap­tain Hitch­cock (Simon McBur­ney) to turn for help to wid­owed police offi­cer Augus­tus Lan­dor (Chris­t­ian Bale, also in Cooper’s Out of the Fur­nace and Hos­tiles), who lives local­ly and has a rep­u­ta­tion for solv­ing dif­fi­cult cas­es. Haunt­ed by the dis­ap­pear­ance of his beloved daugh­ter Mad­die, Lan­dor is a bit­ter, bro­ken man who has turned his back on God – but he nonethe­less agrees to con­duct a dis­creet inves­ti­ga­tion, and quick­ly deter­mines that the death was not a sui­cide but a murder.

Soon Lan­dor part­ners up with Cadet Poe (Har­ry Melling), an eccen­tric mis­fit in this envi­ron­ment but also clear­ly a man of sig­nif­i­cant tal­ents, and the old­er and younger man, like William and Adso in The Name of the Rose, set about find­ing the killer togeth­er even as more bod­ies, both ani­mal and human, are found with their hearts and oth­er parts miss­ing. Lan­dor and Poe are drawn to the Academy’s doc­tor Mar­quis (Toby Jones), his neu­rot­ic wife Julia (Gillian Ander­son), their Cadet son Artemis (Har­ry Lawtey) and sick­ly daugh­ter Leah (Lucy Boyn­ton) – a cul­tured if dys­func­tion­al clan who may some­how be con­nect­ed to all the occult killings – even as the evi­dence starts point­ing towards Poe himself.

The Pale Blue Eye is all at once a melan­cholic romance, a revenger’s tragedy, and an intrigu­ing mys­tery. Its one prob­lem, though, is that it comes with a glacial pace to match its win­try set­ting. By the time the main plot has reached some­thing like a con­clu­sion and been offi­cial­ly wrapped up, the film lurch­es on into a lengthy coda which recasts the film’s events in a rather dif­fer­ent light – and while this sec­ond solu­tion is inge­nious and sat­is­fy­ing and packs a real emo­tion­al punch, its impact is under­mined by com­ing so late in a film that has already felt on the long side.