The Pale Blue Eye

'The Pale Blue Eye' follows a local detective and Edgar Allan Poe investigating a series of gruesome murders. So, who is the killer? Spoilers ahead!

[Fred Hechinger](https://www.distractify.com/p/does-the-cat-die-in-woman-in-the-window)) also raped his daughter, so he tortures and murders him as well. [Gillian Anderson](https://www.distractify.com/p/why-does-gillian-anderson-have-a-british-accent)), Lea drugs Poe and begins the supernatural ritual. However, he ultimately decides Landor has been through enough and burns the evidence. As it turns out, Landor is the killer in The Pale Blue Eye. [Harry Lawtey](https://www.distractify.com/p/harry-lawtey-dating)) are responsible for Leroy Fry's death (or are they?), having cut his heart out to cast the life-saving spell. This time, Landor cut the heart out to make it seem like the work of a sadistic serial killer. [The Pale Blue Eye](https://www.distractify.com/p/the-pale-blue-eye-review), is finally here. This becomes the perfect opportunity for Landor to lay the blame on someone else. He spends much of the film mourning, claiming his daughter Mattie ran away with a man. Luckily, detective Landor arrives just in time and saves Poe. She soon contacts a deceased relative who dabbled in witchcraft, and he convinces Lea a human heart will cure her. Lea Marquis (

The Pale Blue Eye movie review: A gothic mystery that not only owes a great creative debt to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe but also features him as a ...

The only time that Cooper displays any sort of levity in this movie is in his direction of Melling. The supporting cast is filled out by excellent character actors such as Tobey Jones, who plays the coroner; Simon McBurney, who plays a captain; and Timothy Spall, who drops by as the captain’s superior. Landor is described in a convenient early exposition dump as a widower who is particularly adept at ‘gloveless interrogations’. He’s someone who doesn’t take things at face value, which makes him a fun foil to the rather austere Augustus. This, by the way, happens an hour after Robert Duvall has dropped by as a tattooed puzzle solver named Jean-Pepe who studies the occult in his spare time. In fact, he’s spent the entirety of his directorial career making grim dramas — three of which have now starred

Netflix's latest release, The Pale Blue Eye, features a snow-clad 1830s Hudson Valley, a highly believable Edgar Allan Poe, and some big names like ...

The Pale Blue Eye has the eerie ability to hook viewers even when the film is circling around in the field of plot points and often landing in the wrong places. The question of narrative momentum and smoother pacing is always going to be raised when talking about The Pale Blue Eye. The technical marvel is almost shocking. The investigative film takes viewers back to the time when Edgar Allan Poe (played by Harry Melling here) was still not on his way to the stars. Its setting, tone, and lighting also matched the mood that the film was supposed to deliver. If the director, Scott Cooper, indeed released the film in accordance with the weather, it was quite a smart move.

New Netflix movie The Pale Blue Eye features Edgar Allen Poe investigating a murder, but is the Gothic thriller based on a true story?

They're not the only Easter eggs to be found for any Poe fans watching the movie, such as the fact that the title itself comes from a line in The Tell-Tale Heart. The rest of it just had to be filled in," Bayard told Poe spent six months at the academy as a cadet before he was court-martialled for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes or church. And, unfortunately, The Pale Blue Eye isn't based on a true story despite Poe's presence. (In the movie, Poe does use the line in a poem, but it's not The Tell-Tale Heart he's reciting.) As we see in the movie, Poe really was a cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York and like the movie infers, the soon-to-be-famous writer wasn't exactly the best fit for the academy.

The Pale Blue Eye, starring Christian Bale and Harry Melling, is out now on Netflix, but is the Gothic murder-mystery any good? Our review of The Pale Blue ...

Everything has been so understated to this point that the major revelation comes out of nowhere, but it leaves you questioning its logic rather than marvelling at the audacity. You won't resolve all your questions with a second watch, but it does hold together better than you'd expect when you're initially blindsided by the development. Landor, in turn, enlists the help of outcast cadet Edgar Allan Poe ( [Harry Melling](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42391808/netflix-pale-blue-eye-edgar-allan-poe/)) – yes, the famous writer – to uncover the truth from the inside. It's a flamboyant turn from Melling, complete with Southern accent and plenty of Poe-esque florid language that gives the movie a lightness it sorely lacks elsewhere. At home, though, you might find your attention wandering, as the investigation deals more in discussions of mortality than twisty revelations. [Glass Onion](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42294175/glass-onion-review/).

It's murder at West Point where a young Edgar Allen Poe is a cadet (for real) and the atmosphere is shrouded in mystery and madness. That alone makes "The ...

The great Robert Duvall also shows up as Jean Pepe, an occult expert brought in to investigate a rash of satanic rituals at the Point. There's a hint of suspense when Lea's macho cadet brother Artemus (Harry Lawtey) gets drawn into the case. The time is 1830 and Landor is still mourning the death of his wife and the disappearance of his daughter. What a shame that writer-director Scott Cooper ("Crazy Heart") so utterly fails to build dramatic momentum. To help him break the code of silence among cadets, Landor enlists Poe, who only had a few poems published at the time. There's nothing like a brutal murder or two to connect this pair of obsessives.

The impressionistic tale of a young Edgar Allan Poe may not be based in fact, but it captures the essence of the young writer.

Yet bringing them together in this way tips The Pale Blue Eye into ludicrous, overlong melodrama. Henry Melling – known to viewers as Dudley Dursey of the The acting, which is mainly excellent, becomes hammy. As more murders ensue, the mystery deepens. Auguste Dupin (whose name Bale’s Augustus Landor partially evokes). The body is found hanging from a tree by the banks of the Hudson. His rib cage has been surgically ripped open and the heart removed. [cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s](https://variety.com/2012/film/news/takayanagi-japanese-transplant-captures-extreme-conditions-1118049919/) evocative palette, where the pale blue cloaks of the West Point cadets contrast with the monochrome winter setting. The specific image of a pale blue eye is evoked by the seductive Lea Marquis’s (Lucy Boynton) eyes and the “piercing look” of detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale). [crop up repeatedly](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/439628) in Poe’s work: [occult ritual and cryptograms](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-cipher-from-poe-solved/), the border between sanity and insanity, the image of the [beautiful dead woman](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=090diHhmp40C&printsec=front_cover&redir_esc=) – which Poe notoriously described as “the most poetical topic in the world”. [The Tell-Tale Heart](https://poemuseum.org/the-tell-tale-heart/), the story of a man so disturbed by a lodging house mate’s pale blue “vulture eye” that he kills him and dismembers his body so he can hide it under the floorboards. [Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe's writings to solve the mystery of his death](https://theconversation.com/depression-and-language-analysing-edgar-allan-poes-writings-to-solve-the-mystery-of-his-death-131421)

The military summons Christian Bale's veteran detective Augustus Landor to solve the crime. Also at the academy as a cadet is Harry Melling's young Edgar Allan ...

One cannot get enough books, the other wants to have nothing to do with them. It wouldn't have changed naught else in the story. In such mysteries, the elements are one of the characters, and Cooper and Takayanagi recognise that. The corpse of a cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York has been found hanged, and later at the mortuary its heart is ripped out with the precision of a surgeon. The only out-there thing about it is Poe himself. Soon enough, another cadet is found brutally murdered in the nearby woods, his heart too carved out from his chest—though, this time the procedure appears cruder.

'A film shouldn't be like an enema,' says writer-director Scott Cooper. Here's how he and frequent collaborator Christian Bale stretched its suspense.

“We wanted it to feel bare, unforgiving and brutal, with a very narrow color palette, almost shooting the film in black and white,” Cooper says. “It was a brutal shoot,” Cooper says. “It made it memorable,” recalls Bale. “Somebody as intense and masculine as Landor is realizing that he’s missed a great deal in assuming that he has time,” Bale says. “He approached him as someone warm, witty and humorous, prone to poetic and romantic flourishes, looking for a connection.” “So lifelike that I would look over at one of the actors looking at his cadaver, and you could see them having an unsettling out-of-body experience. “And Christian is on that ledge with me [to] explore the darker corners of the human psyche.” “When I started to look at his work with more intention, it was a surprise [to discover] how much he has infiltrated culture and my brain without me even knowing that it was him doing so. Cooper has been contemplating the chief questions of “The Pale Blue Eye” since reading it after directing his first film, The gentle yet opinionated loner — not the “Master of the Macabre” just yet — teams up with Landor for the investigation. To become legendary, you have to be a keen, invisible observer and not be a part of the story, which Christian did beautifully.” Transport the audience somewhere, “The Pale Blue Eye” does.

Directed by Scott Cooper and starring Academy Award winner Christian Bale, the Netflix gothic thriller The Pale Blue Eye begins streaming today – and the ...

Sadly, The Pale Blue Eye has been faced with some criticism. “The Pale Blue Eye intrigues with fascinating character dynamics and occult themes. A solidly built mystery, The Pale Blue Eye crumbles in the underwhelming third act, which doesn’t deliver a resolution that fits the complexity of the crime presented. The narrative eventually stumbles with pacing issues and a perplexing, twist-laden third act. [Christian Bale](https://movieweb.com/person/christian-bale/), the Netflix gothic thriller [The Pale Blue Eye](https://movieweb.com/movie/the-pale-blue-eye/) begins streaming today – and the reviews are now in. So, is The Pale Blue Eye and its central murder mystery worth a watch?

Movie review: Christian Bale and Harry Melling star in the new atmospheric Netflix mystery The Pale Blue Eye. Veteran detective Augustus Landor and young ...

This also sets up a challenge for the movie: how to deliver a solution that not only makes sense but also honors the captivating cruelty of the crimes committed. Ultimately, it’s all pretty gripping, not just because of Bale and Melling and the heady atmosphere but because the crimes being investigated are savage on a downright existential level. (Is he the only American in the cast? Robert Duvall (!!!) plays a professor of the occult. We’re dealing with a fundamentally cozy genre, however, and familiarity is allowed and encouraged. (In real life, Poe lasted only a few months at the school.) You also sense, in his mannerisms and speech, that this is a man who will either make his mark on the world or end up dead in a ditch. When Poe visits Landor’s house and admires books that were clearly his daughter’s, we start to understand why the older man has softened around this misfit poet-cadet: The young man reminds him of his lost daughter. This father-son dynamic powers the whole picture and sets up several key moments in the film’s climax. “To remove a man’s heart is to traffic in symbol. Those of us for whom Sherlock Holmes served as a gateway drug into serious literature can testify to this: The Victoriana, the cobblestones and gaslight, all were just as essential as the cases themselves to our fascination, maybe more so. Landor has lost his wife to illness, and his daughter, we’re told, recently ran away from home; he came to these woods to find happiness with his family and wound up alone and embittered. “The heart is a symbol, or it is nothing,” Poe explains.

How do Landor and Poe solve the mystery? ( ...

After learning of Ballinger’s involvement from Fry’s diary, Landor killed and mutilated him in the same way to make the murders appear ritualistic. Landor confesses that his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson), didn’t actually run away, but was raped by three assailants on her way home from the academy ball two years earlier and later jumped off a cliff to her death. Lea drugs Poe and, with the help of Artemus and their mother Julia (Gillian Anderson), prepares to cut out his heart and sacrifice him. After finding an officer’s jacket that links Artemus to the scene of Fry’s heart abduction, Landor works out that the Marquis family attempted an occult ritual involving the sacrifice of a human heart to try to prolong Lea’s life—and it worked. “I knew that from the moment I first met you, and here we are.” Mattie came away from the assault holding Fry’s dog tag, leading Landor to seek revenge on Fry following her suicide. Landor manages to pull Poe and Julia to safety, but Lea and Artemus are crushed and killed by falling debris. The diary reveals that Fry and Ballinger were close friends, and, soon after, it’s discovered that their other friend, Cadet Stoddard (Joey Brooks), appears to have run off. The cadet, Leroy Fry (Steven Meier), was hanged and, in an even more disturbing turn of events, had his heart cut out and stolen while his body sat inside the school’s hospital. While The Pale Blue Eye is a work of fiction, the real-life Poe did in fact attend West Point before being Lea suffers from a seizure disorder and has been given only a few months to live. And it’s a doozy of a whodunnit.

The Pale Blue Eye review: Actors Christian Bale and Harry Melling headline the thriller with their steady performances, even as the film's central mystery ...

For the most part Netflix's film concentrates on developing the whodunit, favouring loose Poe-esque tropes over overt clichés.

Scott Cooper has directed Christian Bale in a well-crafted mystery in Netflix's latest detective thriller, which is intriguing but lacks the final punch.

Augustus Landor is a fictional creation from Bayard's novel and now Cooper's movie. His last name comes from Poe's short story, “Landor's Cottage.” Originally ...

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is the first murder mystery based on the details of a real crime. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin calls Vidocq “a good guesser.” In the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), Holmes similarly dismisses the French detective’s fictional adaptation. It is fun to imagine the writer similarly going along on the case as the unnamed narrator in the short stories. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is also the first “locked room” mystery. In the film The Pale Blue Eye, it is young Edgar who eagerly helps the eccentric but brilliant detective probing the academy murders. He has no professional stake in their solution, it is a favor to him to pass the time. Auguste Dupin is the master analyst in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” which was published in three installments in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion, beginning in late 1842, and “The Purloined Letter,” published in 1844. That generation of readers was among the first to be made to feel actively part of the reported happenings of the day. There is nothing in the room but two bags of gold coins, torn hair, and the blade, still covered in blood. The Edgars, the most prestigious award of the Mystery Writers of America, is named in his honor. A mother and daughter are found dead in the sealed space deemed to be the crime scene. His last name comes from Poe’s short story, “Landor’s Cottage.” Originally published in 1849, it is a descriptive work, without mystery or violence, that works as a contemplative rest stop for the retired detective’s dwelling in The Pale Blue Eye.