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128 minutes, on Netflix
3 stars
The story: Christian Bale stars as a retired detective who recruits a wily West Point cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) to help solve a series of grisly homicides at the United States Military Academy in 1830 New York.
The Pale Blue Eye continues Bale’s run of dramas with his Out Of The Furnace (2013) and Hostiles (2017) writer-director Scott Cooper – although “run” may not be the best word for this slow-going gothic whodunnit based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 bestseller.
Cadets are being slain with their hearts carved out amid the grey winter gloom, and Bale’s solemn ex-constable Augustus Landor is methodical in his sleuthing despite the scandal-shy academy hurrying him to conclude the investigation.
Thankfully, there is a hammy Melling to help viewers pass time. All grown up from his Dudley Dursley days in the Harry Potter films (2001 to 2011), he plays Poe as an overweening pasty-faced weirdo excited by the macabre. “I am a poet,” he announces to Landor.
That he is. The father of modern detective fiction was also briefly a military student.
These are the only biographical truths in an invented origin story of Poe that recasts the budding author as amateur gumshoe, fighting black magic and the ghosts of loved ones alongside fictitious mentor Landor.
The duo’s central relationship ends in a bizarre climactic twist. Everyone is a suspect in a movie with a murderers’ row of supporting players including Toby Jones, Timothy Spall, Gillian Anderson and Robert Duvall. Even the titular raven from Poe’s 1845 poem gets a cameo.
Hot take: The storytelling is plodding, nothing Poe-tic about it, but Poe himself is a lively, eccentric presence.
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