Edgar Allan Poe’s decadently cerebral approach to genre is an odd fit for Hollywood, which tends to tear into its pulp pleasures with a hearty trencherman’s aplomb, rather than sipping them delicately from paper-thin china. Sure enough, Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is not very Poe-like, even if it features the poet as a character. Agatha Christie, with her twisty plots and straightforward examination of human evil, is a clearer literary antecedent than Poe’s layers of irony, intellectual play, and sensual embrace of the bizarre.
This isn’t exactly a criticism; Agatha Christie is also great, and this is a skillful variation on some of her most treasured tricks. A cadet is murdered at West Point, his heart cut from his corpse. A gruff detective with a painful past, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is called in to help with the investigation. He enlists cadet Poe (Harry Melling) to help him gather information from the other trainees. Their investigations lead them to a mysterious circle of devil worshippers, perhaps connected to the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). Daniel’s son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) is a cadet. His daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) is an accomplished pianist and an epileptic; she and Poe inevitably and instantly fall for each other.
Melling, all long fingers and penetrating stares, is a fine Poe, and the movie is littered with references to the writer’s work. We get a close-up of a raven, the poem “Lenore” is connected to Lea, and Landor lives in a cottage, per Poe’s story “Landor’s Cottage.” These are all surface trifles, though. The center of the film is Bale’s performance—a frozen surface which cracks open to reveal icy, rushing depths—and the cold New York landscape, with swirls of snow and bare tree limbs against the stark sky. The Pale Blue Eye sees, in the end, with clarity; it is a movie about revealing and understanding hard truths. It’s a fine Hollywood film. But Poe’s mysteries aren’t so easy to pin down. R, 128 min.