Film Review — The Pale Blue Eye
★★★☆☆
A troubled detective recruits a young Edgar Allen Poe to investigate a series of brutal murders at a military academy.
Netflix sure loves a good murder mystery right now, doesn’t it? Arriving weeks after Rian Johnson’s lighter, brighter Knives Out sequel, Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye might share a similar storytelling mechanism, but it’s a completely different beast.
Based on Louis Bayard’s fictitious Edgar Allen Poe origin story, The Pale Blue Eye reunites Cooper with Christian Bale for the third time following 2013’s Out of the Furnace and 2017’s Hostiles. Bale is predictably chameleonic, delivering a muted performance that deepens in range as the mystery unravels. The real standout here, however, is co-star Harry Melling — finally kicking off the Harry Potter shackles — who completely loses himself in a layered and enigmatic realisation of Poe.
The rest of the cast is quite an assembly as well. Gillian Anderson, Toby Jones, Timothy Spall and Lucy Boynton all provide memorable supporting performances, with Boynton, in particular, making the most of her limited screen time. The same can’t be said for Charlotte Gainsbourg and longtime Cooper collaborator Robert Duvall, top-tier actors who are given so little to do I wonder what they saw in the project.
Like much of his filmography, Cooper demonstrates a strong grasp of atmosphere as an immersive tool. The Pale Blue Eye ably captures the cold, harsh nature of its rustic, early New York setting. The pace is incredibly slow, clearly a stylistic choice, but as the truth begins to reveal, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is an uncomfortably uneven experience.
It’s nowhere near the critical dud it’s being labelled by some, however. It can be a slog at times, for sure, but the Pale Blue Eye offers more than enough for fans of the genre, as well as those who love films whose foreboding atmosphere can actually be felt.
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