The Pale Blue Eye

New to Netflix today (following a brief run in select cinemas back in December) is the mystery-thriller, The Pale Blue Eye. The movie – written and directed ...

Joining Bale and Melling is a great supporting cast which includes the likes of Timothy Spall and Toby Jones, as well as the always brilliant Gillian Anderson. This film has been put together by a great team, and the results are there for all to see on screen. This journey becomes intertwined with Landor and the pair become fascinating to watch as they try and crack the case. There is a bit of backstory to Landor, which is teased early on, and this leaves room for growth throughout the picture. From the opening moments of the movie, there is a sense this is going to be an intriguing story. And then just when it appears as if this is going to be entirely Bale’s movie, the film introduces Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe, who slots in neatly alongside his co-star.

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)

Jan. 6 (UPI) -- Gothic mystery The Pale Blue Eye, investigative journalism drama She Said, nature docuseries A Year on Planet Earth and reality competition ...

[streams Sunday](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2022/12/30/10-shows-to-watch-january-2023/5831672406569/) on Fox Nation. [simulcasts its premiere episode](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2022/12/20/Anne-Rice-Mayfair-Witches-simulcast/6441671577333/) Friday on AMC, BBC America, IFC, SundanceTV and WeTV. [returns for a second season](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2022/12/30/10-shows-to-watch-january-2023/5831672406569/) Friday on Starz and the cable network's streaming app. [Mo'Nique](https://www.upi.com/topic/Mo_Nique/) [joins the cast](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2022/05/11/Monique-joins-BMF-Season-2-Starz/5121652278684/) for Season 2 as Goldie, a sophisticated Atlanta strip club owner who becomes an ally to the brothers. [will be the first](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2022/12/13/RuPauls-Drag-Race-Season-15-cast-to-include-twins/4141670952841/) to feature a set of twins as competitors. Rowan Fielding, who [uncovers the secrets](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2022/10/07/Mayfair-Witches-trailer-Anne-Rice-AMC/5011665148123/) of her family's occult history with help from Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa), while trying to avoid the attention of the demon Lasher (Jack Huston). [which streams Friday](https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Movies/2022/12/30/she-said-movie-peacock-january-2023/3581672424914/) on Peacock. The series follows the Kinloch Bravo oil rig crew in the North Sea as their plans to return to land are foiled by a mysterious fog that appears and cuts off their communication with land. A chef is voted off at the end of each episode until the last cook standing earns a $100,000 prize. Based on the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, the film follows Augustus Landor ( [Christian Bale](https://www.upi.com/topic/Christian_Bale/)), a detective who teams up with a young [Edgar Allen Poe](https://www.upi.com/topic/Edgar_Allen_Poe/) (Harry Melling) to investigate a series of murders at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., in 1830. The film, written and directed by Scott Cooper, also stars Lucy Boynton, [Gillian Anderson](https://www.upi.com/topic/Gillian_Anderson/), Charlie Tahan, Charlotte Gainsbourg, [Toby Jones](https://www.upi.com/topic/Toby_Jones/), Harry Lawtey, Timothy Spall, Simon McBurney, Gideon Glick, Hadley Robinson, Fred Hechinger and [Robert Duvall](https://www.upi.com/topic/Robert_Duvall/). [Carey Mulligan](https://www.upi.com/topic/Carey_Mulligan/) plays Megan Twohey and Zoe Kazan plays Jodi Kantor, New York Times journalists who detailed the sexual assault allegations against former Miramax head [Harvey Weinstein](https://www.upi.com/topic/Harvey_Weinstein/).

'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?

Harry Melling plays a young Edgar Allan Poe who assists a detective (Christian Bale) in "The Pale Blue Eye," premiering Friday on Netflix.

But the best of the bunch is a wild performance by Gillian Anderson as the dotty but sly wife of the academy doctor (Jones). The fine supporting cast includes a battalion of British character actors (including Timothy Spall, Toby Jones and Simon McBurney) playing the military officials running the school, and an unrecognizable Robert Duvall as an old mentor of Landor’s. Would we see young Poe (Harry Melling) get bricked up in a wine cellar, or get caught between a pit and a pendulum, or hear the beating of a telltale heart?

John Fetterman officially became the 54th senator in Pennsylvania history this week. But courtesy of Netflix, he can add another job to his resume: Actor.

[ made a cameo in 2005′s Wedding Crashers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/john-mccain-dead-5-memorable-cameos-tv-shows-movies-1137309/saturday-night-live-2002/). [as Fetterman tweeted last month](https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1601282214226165760), his wife Gisele also makes a cameo in The Pale Blue Eye. ... That’s a face that fits in the 1830s.’” She is possibly in the background of one scene in the same tavern about 45 minutes after Fetterman appears, though if it’s her, the background is too out of focus to conclusively tell. After all, looking for a senator in the film already broke the fourth wall plenty for us. We clocked him in one scene early in the film, when Bale’s character goes to a tavern after starting his murder investigation.

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.

When a West Point cadet is discovered dead in 1830 and his heart is later carved out of his chest, military leaders of the academy ask Detective Augustus Landor ...

Landor not only killed Fry, but he was summoned to West Point to solve the mystery he created. Poe has all the information he needs to turn Landor in. He left Poe with the note from Fry’s hand (which was assumed to be from Lea). But Poe noticed that the handwriting on the note matches a note that Landor once wrote to him. When Landor rushes in to stop them, Lea knocks over a candle, and fire overtakes the room. Seeing promise in one of the academy’s own, Landor enlists a young cadet for help: the poet Edgar Allan Poe (Henry Melling).

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.