‘The Pale Blue Eye’ Takes Itself Way Too Seriously

Writer-director Scott Cooper’s new film, the gothic mystery The Pale Blue Eye, begins with such gloomy promise. The film, in theaters December 23 and on Netflix January 6, is set in the snowy Hudson Valley in 1830. A death—perhaps murder most foul?—has happened on the campus of the military academy at West Point and a grizzled former constable reluctantly agrees to investigate the case. 

We don’t see many movies like this these days: old-fashioned genre pictures heavy with glossy finishings in service of a cracking story. The Pale Blue Eye, adapted from the 2003 novel of the same name, has the potential to be exactly that. A prestige-y director leads a prestigious cast of British thespians: Christian Bale, Toby Jones, Timothy Spall, and Gillian Anderson. (Plus a few Americans, like Robert Duvall). The scenery is picturesque, the details of the case appropriately gruesome. Howard Shore’s score evokes the ominous swell and churn of his work on The Silence of the Lambs. 

There’s even a kicky literary gimmick: one of the cadets involved in the case, one a bit older than his peers, is none other than Edgar Allan Poe, whose macabre poeticism is given hot-winded flair by the actor Harry Melling. What a good time we could have with The Pale Blue Eye.

But, alas, Cooper is not a director known for having fun. His films are grave and somber, from the stately Western Hostiles to the overreaching and undercooked horror of Antlers. Cooper is good with mood and aesthetics, but gets bogged down in his seriousness, a seemingly innate drive to extract big meaning from the confines of genre. He tries a little less hard to do that in The Pale Blue Eye, but still doesn’t seem to recognize the film’s true possibility. This should be a slick, handsomely mounted, quietly self-aware B-movie. Instead, it’s a stab at something like grandeur.

Bale plays Augustus Landor, a once-renowned detective now lost to grief. His wife died a number of years ago, and his adolescent daughter has “run off” to places unknown. Isolated and wounded, he’s the right kind of character for the job—people with demons of their own are good at sniffing at those in others. 

Landor takes an immediate interest in young Poe, so flowery and strange compared to the high-born mutes and brutes at the academy. Poe insinuates himself into the investigation with Landor’s amused allowance—Landor figures Poe will be a good inside man, reporting back about the goings on inside the cloistered citadel of West Point. The body that was found, that of an unremarkable cadet, was hanged and later had his heart cut out, a ceremonial sort of mutilation that leads Landor and Poe into a consideration of the occult. There may be devils here.

As they descend into the dark, Landor and Poe strike up a curious allegiance with a wealthy local family. Dr. Marquis (played with grumble and squint by Jones), who acted as coroner on the case, has a haughty and handsome son, Artemus (Harry Lawtey, of Industry fame), enrolled at the Academy; a beautiful but ailing daughter, Lea (Lucy Boynton), at home; and a purring cat of a wife, Julia, given theatrical flourish by Anderson—who really should be in more movies. 

Things take on a faint psychosexual menace; Julia fawningly remarks on the attractiveness of her own son, Lea and Poe share guarded flirtations that feel freighted with portent. But Cooper doesn’t tease out any of these darkly intriguing elements. Sure, he lets Anderson gnaw at the scenery, but he doesn’t take her cue and give space to the rest of the movie to explore its own campy possibilities.

Well, Melling is fully out there, right alongside Anderson. But Bale is oddly restrained. This was a great opportunity to let a famously expressive actor go wild with one of his weirdo creations. Instead, he closes in, leaving supporting characters to swan and speechify around him while he maintains a soggy blankness. That imbalance is aptly representative of the film as a whole, its feet planted in two different worlds, unsure of which it should fully inhabit. 

Cooper’s finely rendered dankness eventually leads to boredom. This is a strangely bloodless movie, considering it’s about people having their hearts ripped out. I suppose the film’s final-act twist could be seen as the jolt of energy we’ve been in search of, but even that is delivered with a solemnity that precludes the shivery thrill of revelation. 

What The Pale Blue Eye needs, with its good genes and healthy budget, is a redo, a juiced-up second attempt that brings us back to the lurid days of, say, From Hell. One can admire an attempt to infuse a refined period-piece mystery with genuine pathos. But when you’ve got a cartoonish version of Edgar Allan Poe running around looking for clues, the best course of action is probably to follow him down the rabbit hole.