The Pale Blue Eye

 

Christian Bale's name might top the call sheet for Scott Cooper's absorbing The Pale Blue Eye (Netflix) but Harry Melling (best known for the Harry Potter series) is the true star.

Bale plays a gristly retired detective in the 1830s, living near the West Point Military Academy, who is contracted by the school's superintendent to investigate the death of a cadet.

Reluctantly, Bale's Augustus Landor agrees, and quickly discovers the man was murdered and his corpse mutilated. Finding his investigation impeded by the cadets themselves, Landor employs a talkative and eccentric senior cadet to be his eyes and ears behind the walls. The cadet's name is Edgar A. Poe (Melling). Yes, that Poe.

Cooper has a wonderful eye for period detail and he gives Bale and Melling plenty of room to flesh out the taciturn and tormented Landor and the creepily angular and morbid Poe as they combine their individual miseries into a single driving force to uncover the truth.

Also in the cast are Timothy Spall as the superintendent, Toby Jones as the academy's doctor and Gillian Anderson as the physician's wife, who seems to be guarding her own secrets.

The first two acts are slow and methodical, the landscape barren and dreary, but the story is rich and Melling's Poe histrionic and fascinating. Those elements make up for the film's ending, which, truth be told, is both outrageous and grandly poetic, like the great writer himself.