Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Pale Blue Eye’ on Netflix, a Doom-and-Gloom Period Detective Mystery Starring Christian Bale

Christian Bale and director Scott Cooper team up for the third time in The Pale Blue Eye, a 19th-century detective story that’s just as gloomy and somber as their previous films, blue-collar crime-drama Out of the Furnace and gritty Western Hostiles. Pale is an adaptation of Louis Bayard’s historical-fiction novel, starring Bale as a sleuth investigating the death of a West Point cadet, and his apprentice/assistant is none other than a young Edgar Allan Poe, played by Harry Melling – which of course has us wondering if it’s any good, or if we’ll just be quoting the raven on this one.

THE PALE BLUE EYE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A gray northeastern winter. The grayest, perhaps. A man, hanged. Another man, still alive: Augustus Landor (Bale), although one wonders if he maybe doesn’t want to be. Alive, that is. Or Augustus Landor. He seems like a miserable, lonely sort. A widower. His daughter, gone. R-U-N-N-O-F-T, he says. His business is death – investigating it. Snooping for clues. Nailing the culprits. He has a reputation for it. A good one. He’s called to the military academy at West Point. That hanged man? A student, a soldier-to-be. It wasn’t suicide. No, his feet were touching the ground. His fingernails ragged from clawing at the noose. A contusion on the back of his head. And there’s the matter of his heart. It was cut out, with some precision. That’s not… usual. Will the heart tell the tale? WE’LL SEE. It’s 1830.

Landor reports to a couple of sourpussed harummphers, Capt. Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) and Supt. Thayer (Timothy Spall). These men exist to pull their faces into puckered mugs, a likely side effect of being a military lifer. They know Landor is good at his job; they also know he tends to imbibe. “No drinking,” is the warning, and a few beats later, he walks into the local tavern for a sip. There, he meets an odd gent who introduces himself as “Poe. E.A. Poe. Edgar A. Poe,” which is kind of funny for us, if not necessarily for Landor. I don’t think anything is funny for Landor, ever.

Let’s talk about this kid. Poe is a young cadet at West Point who, upon a single glance, looks doomed to flunk out sooner rather than later. He admits to being a poet whose dead mother dictates verse to him in his dreams, which is, you know, nifty. He’s not exactly prime soldier material – and therefore perfect to be Landor’s man on the inside. He offers Poe a job that will earn him no money or recognition and will endear him to no one. He accepts. You get the feeling nobody likes this weirdo anyway. But we do. For sure. A little annoying, a little heavy-handed with the look-ma-I’m-a-poet shit, a little too keen on flaunting his eccentricities, but he’s a true weirdo who isn’t at all a military bro marinating in a damp cloud of his own machismo farts.

They get to snooping. Poe mingles with fellow cadets who all look alike in their stupid double-breasted brass-buttoned outfits, chiseled cheekbones and ample sideburns. Landor chats with the campus physician, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones) and his family: son Artemus (Harry Lawtey), a cadet; daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton), an ailing waif; and his wife Julia (Gillian Anderson), something of a kook. Poe asks Lea on a date for a leisurely frigid-winter stroll through the graveyard, and she accepts, because Poe understands that she too “dwells in the realms of melancholy.” Meanwhile, a nearby cow and sheep turn up dead with hearts cut out, followed by a second cadet, who’s missing more than just his ticker. (Don’t ask!) Landor sniffs something Satanic in the air, leading him to a crotchety old screwball and Haver of Occult Knowledge who looks like he smells like a decade-old dead rat caught in a trap, and is played by Robert Duvall (!). When he’s not gumshoeing, Landor snuggles with a woefully underdeveloped barmaid character (Charlotte Gainsbourg) or sits in his little cottage sadly eyeing an old photo, fingering a ribbon and having visions of his lovely, long-lost daughter. We have little doubt he’ll crack this case, but how, and to what end?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Pale Blue Eye doesn’t take quite as many historical liberties as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but it’s sort of in the same ballpark. Otherwise, it has the basic narrative bones of a Sherlock Holmes adventure not directed by Guy Ritchie, and has a few elements in common with neo-murder mysteries like Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie revivals (note: a sense of humor is not one of the commonalities). It ultimately exists deeper in the crime-drama genre in which Cooper thrives, with a bit of horror along the lines of his 2021 folky creature feature Antlers.

Performance Worth Watching: Christian Bale does what he does best: Maintains a rock-solid foundation for the movie, and capably adds some flavor to a script thin on character. Pair him with an odd duck like Melling – a career character actor whose best work is in Coen Bros. films The Tragedy of MacBeth and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – and together they overcome some of the film’s flaws.

Memorable Dialogue: Hitchcock and Landor reach an ideological impasse:

Hitchcock: Be your standard, every crime committed by a Christian will be a stain on Christ!

Landor: And so it is.

Sex and Skin: None. Everyone is so pale anyway.

Our Take: You can’t deny The Pale Blue Eye’s atmosphere – the mist all but emerges from the screen and consumes your living room. Cooper’s eye for period detail and knack for establishing a downcast tone render the film a robustly immersive experience, very much in line with our expectations for his work. It’s a proficient, highly watchable movie, strong in every technical capacity, from an emotive score to its beautifully funereal lighting, all candles and lamp oil burning in dark, dark browns.

Also in line with Cooper’s filmography, The Pale Blue Eye seems a bit too content to go through the motions narratively. The characters all but beg for stronger dramatic arcs, the emotional content doesn’t set its hook deep enough and the political and ideological conflicts between Landor and the military brass is inchoate. The performances are uniformly strong, everyone but Bale – he’s the voice of calm, collected reason here, remember – elevating their line readings to a level of entertaining exaggeration (Anderson pegs over the eyeroll-o-meter with an over-the-top mannerisms). Cooper only dabbles in horror, and it feels like an affectation more than a commitment, and leads to a final act a shade too hysterical for its own good, and burdened with an overly drawn-out, too-tidy conclusion.

Yet none of these flaws are gamebreakers. Genre fiction in any form is perfectly entertaining on its own terms, especially when exercising style and ambience. It sometimes feels as if Cooper’s film is on the cusp of something more ambitious and literary, but he seems disinterested in achieving that level of pretension. The Pale Blue Eye is pretty good for its depressive-whodunit niche, but doesn’t offer much beyond that.

Our Call: The Pale Blue Eye is a rock-solid history-mystery. STREAM IT, but don’t expect to remember it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.