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The Pale Blue Eye, or West Point Ripper, a Junior Edgar Allan Poe Mystery


The Pale Blue Eye is the second mystery movie to hit Netflix in the last month starring a British actor putting on a heightened southern affect. It is not the better of the two.
And yet it’s an intriguing movie anyway, built out of the slightly silly premise of Edgar Allan Poe solving a serial murder case in 1830s downstate New York. It’s not the first instance of such a synopsis -you may remember the 2012 film The Raven starring John Cusack as the iconic gothic poet. This one though is a little more curious, not based around copycat murders, but rather pulling from a short period in Poe’s biography when he attended the military academy at West Point as a young man. Weaved into a mystery involving dead cadets by novelist Louis Bayard, Scott Cooper has adapted the book as a somewhat prestige period thriller with reliable collaborator Christian Bale as the retired investigator who brings onto the case the bright student Poe played by Harry Melling.
Obviously incorporating a touch of the macabre, The Pale Blue Eye is very much at home in the company of movies like Sleepy Hollow and From Hell -with which it shares a notable directorial competence, a fascination with period occultism, an interest in the material of grisly murders, a standout supporting cast of (largely British) veteran actors, and an unwavering sense of B-movie cheesiness in spite of all of this. For some of the detours this movie takes, Cooper and Bale and company go at it too seriously, but there’s charm to this earnestness, a sense of sincere investment by all involved that you can’t help admire -something that another Bale movie this year could not pull off.
Bale himself is responsible for some of this, he takes to the role with fierce commitment, once again donning highly appropriate facial hair for the period and a gruff voice that best suits the moments he is required to yell. His Detective Landor is introduced  by a shack near a river where he has been retired, until summoned by military brass to solve the mystery of a cadet who had been hung, with his heart removed afterwards in the morgue. But the biggest source of unbridled enthusiasm over this movie and all of its’ aspects comes from Harry Melling, shortly introduced as Poe, a verbose, intelligent, and deductive cadet who Landor quickly brings on as his assistant. For the last few years, Melling has been redefining himself from that unflattering role he’s best known for as one of the most interesting character actors of his generation. And he’s done that largely by going big and broad to captivating effect, whether as a histrionic limbless actor in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs or an obnoxious pharmaceutical tycoon in The Old Guard. I see something of a young Kenneth Branagh in his approach, his pattern of acting choices; and depending on how you look at it, Poe might be his greatest achievement yet. It is a truly rapturous performance of unconstrained vigor and outlandish affect, Melling making the most of his every character beat, his every line of dialogue -whether appropriate to the tone of the scene or not. For as wild as his manner may go, as exaggerated as his Virginian-by-way-of-Kentucky-and-Louisiana accent is, there’s a certain conviction there that is palpably genuine amidst everything else that plainly is not. A sublime case of hammy acting, and the most fun aspect of the movie by far.
Not that it’s exactly meant to be a good time. Cooper imbues the movie with a harsh atmosphere and tends to the grisly details with a certain tastefulness -never lingering on corpses or wounds. It is a bleak, cold movie, shot in western Pennsylvania in the wintertime so as to presumably accentuate feelings of dread, and in largely rural, barren environments to evoke a rustic isolation and by degree, danger. Only the local pub ever seems crowded (and if you look closely you can spot recently elected Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman), every other location seems defined by either emptiness or wilderness. It’s an array of sharp choices that relate the mood effectively and even reflect the eerie rising tensions as more mutilated bodies of cadets are discovered. This is bolstered too by an honest gravity conveyed largely through the involvement of authoritative figures played by the likes of Timothy Spall, Simon McBurney, and Robert Duval. But it is a harder task to keep the conversation of the mystery independently interesting, especially as it gets upstaged by Melling or bogged down in dull exposition or pacing. Charlotte Gainsbourg is in the movie rather arbitrarily as a bartender Landor occasionally is seen sleeping with, whose role is merely to ask questions of the case. And then there’s where the movie just takes a turn down the road of black magic.
Given the subject of Poe it’s not a complete shock that the story would dive headlong into the dark and twisted, yet it is still bewildering in how unevenly it is integrated. It’s here where the movie takes on a near quality of camp as it teases a supernatural culprit in spite of the bleak seriousness the tone had thus far occupied. The use of apparent witchcraft in relation to the murders is tied up in the investigation into the family of Toby Jones’ country doctor –which takes precedent for a surprisingly sizeable chunk of the movie- consisting of wife Gillian Anderson extending herself almost as much as Melling, son Harry Lawtey who is also a cadet, and daughter Lucy Boynton who suffers from seizures and suggests a potential romantic pairing with Poe. There is some very silly, enjoyable work being done here, but it does at times lose the plot to the drastic insinuations of this new sensational element. And just as swiftly as these figures and their relationship to heathen magic are introduced so are they dropped from the story with little to no consequence. That may be the biggest sin, and while Cooper clearly finds this last minute misdirect clever, what it really emphasizes is a lack of focus in the narrative structure.
The movie ends a bit meekly, albeit with Poe summing up his findings through monologue in classic detective story fashion –and which Melling is clearly getting a kick out of. Bale comparatively plays it with immense solemn sincerity. And that’s pretty much the pattern of the movie: two lead actors performing at different wavelengths through a story that is written to a grave tone but which incorporates material that disconnects from that rather sharply. Like those movies I cited earlier, it never fully coheres, but it is also poorer for not having their wild spontaneity. The closest it comes is a ritual sequence wherein Poe is nearly dissected. “The Pale Blue Eye” is a reference to Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, an allusion that is genuinely inspired given the thematic links between the two works. For being so interested and indebted to Poe, it’s a shame this movie couldn’t emulate that brilliance. And yet there is a cheeky, splendid thrill to it nonetheless.

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