Director: Scott Cooper
Starring: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Lucy Boynton
Year: 2022
The Pale Blue Eye is Scott Cooper’s 6th film, the others being Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass, Hostiles, and Antlers. Slow burns all, very dark, very heavy, very intense, his latest being no exception whatsoever. But this time we have an added bonus; Edgar Allen Poe. This adaptation of a novel features a fictional story of a murder mystery including the famous Poet, the macabre feeling starting there but going much, much further. A Netflix original you have never heard of, Pale Blue Eye is somehow still one of the best movies of the year, even if no one knows it.
In 1830 in snowy West Point New York, retired detective Augustus Landor is called upon by officials at the military academy to investigate a crime; either a suicide or a murder, it’s hard to say. A cadet has been found dead, apparently hanging himself, and yet his heart was cut out in the night following, indicating something more sinister. Landor, dealing with his own drunkenness, melancholy, and personal losses, tackles the case, but not without a little help. He enlists the secret aid of another cadet, one who may be able to ferret out the truth from the inside, a would-be poet named E.A. Poe. Together they begin to unscramble the mystery, which only leads to greater confusion.
Cooper’s films are always solid, the only real exception being Black Mass, which was fine but not great, and which he didn’t write (and probably which Johnny Depp took over way too much). Otherwise, Cooper is an excellent director, and how this film, especially starring Christian Bale, didn’t get more buzz (more like has never been heard of at all) is beyond me. This is great cinema; cold, hard, interesting, great acting, great music, great mood, a great experience. It is weird, it is heavy, it is imperfect, I’m fine admitting that, but it’s also better than 75% of the films released this year. Bale is incredible, Melling is a revelation, there are definitely too many cameos, but they mostly work anyway, and there was definitely more going well in the first half of the film than the second, but I was already invested by that point anyway; Pale Blue Eye should be a picture we’re discussing come Oscar time, not one that disappears down the streaming drain a month after its release.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆