The Pale Blue Eye

It's murder at West Point where a young Edgar Allen Poe is a cadet (for real) and the atmosphere is shrouded in mystery and madness. That alone makes "The ...

The great Robert Duvall also shows up as Jean Pepe, an occult expert brought in to investigate a rash of satanic rituals at the Point. There's a hint of suspense when Lea's macho cadet brother Artemus (Harry Lawtey) gets drawn into the case. The time is 1830 and Landor is still mourning the death of his wife and the disappearance of his daughter. What a shame that writer-director Scott Cooper ("Crazy Heart") so utterly fails to build dramatic momentum. To help him break the code of silence among cadets, Landor enlists Poe, who only had a few poems published at the time. There's nothing like a brutal murder or two to connect this pair of obsessives.

Netflix's first big movie of the year has just dropped in the early hours on Friday, and fans of gothic horror mysteries are going to be interested in ...

After dropping out of college, he enlisted in the United States Army, and was actually an officer cadet in West Point, New York, just like in The Pale Blue Eye. Though The Pale Blue Eye is fiction, it does feature a real-life person as one of the supporting characters. The film is directed by Scott Cooper (Antlers, Black Mass) and is based on the 2003 book of the same name written by Louis Bayard.

The Pale Blue Eye Ending Explained – who is behind the cadet murders? This article contains spoilers for the Netflix film.

Landor is now ready to join his daughter in the afterlife, a running theme in the film. Lea and her brother walked by the body and ripped the heart for the sake of the ritual. He turns his back to the cliff’s edge, holds out his arms, and lets go of a piece of cloth that his daughter used to tie her hair. So, when Landor killed the second cadet, he made it look like the body was part of the ritual. It turns out the detective is the murderer of the cadets. Poe and Landor figure out that Lea, her mother, and her brother Artemus are speaking to their great-great-grandfather Henri LeClerc beyond the grave. Soon, the fire causes a beam to fall from the rook and kill Lea. Like an expert on the occult, Jean-Pepe ( [Robert Duvall](https://readysteadycut.com/person/Robert-Duvall/)) and Lea’s mother, Julia (played by [Gillian Anderson](https://readysteadycut.com/person/Gillian-Anderson/)), can speak to family members beyond the grave. Landor is sent for by Captain Hitchcock ( [Simon McBurney](https://readysteadycut.com/person/Simon-McBurney/)) and West Point Superintendent Thayer ( [Timothy Spall)](https://readysteadycut.com/person/Timothy-Spall/) after grizzly murder on the grounds of the West Point United States Military Academy near the Hudson river. However, it turns out that the Marquis family was not behind the murders. Earlier, Poe was taken to a private area where Lea has tied Poe, performing a sacred ritual, and is about to cut out his heart. [The Pale Blue Eye](https://readysteadycut.com/2023/01/02/the-pale-blue-eye-review/) follows Augustus Landor ( [Christian Bale](https://readysteadycut.com/person/Christian-Bale/)), a detective of some renown from New York City.

Bale plays a detective and Harry Melling a young Edgar Allan Poe in the Netflix film by Bale's close collaborator Scott Cooper.

“It allows you just to really enjoy it and kind of explore.” he’s so keenly observant and that’s the mark of a great actor.” “He was very much trying to make his own way in the world and had a very nomadic existence,” Melling said. In one scene, “we ended up kind of coming to blows a little bit, which just in itself was quite cool. “She was so interesting as a character to unravel and unpack … “The song was extremely useful,” said Melling. So what I’m saying is that the two hours that take place in this film ultimately motivate him to become the writer that he became that we love.” But the Oscar winner preferred to lighten the mood off-screen, and it involved singing a song or two. I’m fairly certain that we see a version of Christian Bale that you don’t see in any other movie.” Based on the novel by Louis Bayard, “The Pale Blue Eye” is set at West Point in 1830 and follows detective Augustus Landor (Bale) who is hired to discreetly investigate the gruesome murder of a cadet. “He’s accustomed in that era to his detective work sometimes leading to beating confessions out of people. But he’s certainly someone who believes himself to be entirely in control of himself and of his life.

New to Netflix today (following a brief run in select cinemas back in December) is the mystery-thriller, The Pale Blue Eye. The movie – written and directed ...

Joining Bale and Melling is a great supporting cast which includes the likes of Timothy Spall and Toby Jones, as well as the always brilliant Gillian Anderson. This film has been put together by a great team, and the results are there for all to see on screen. This journey becomes intertwined with Landor and the pair become fascinating to watch as they try and crack the case. There is a bit of backstory to Landor, which is teased early on, and this leaves room for growth throughout the picture. From the opening moments of the movie, there is a sense this is going to be an intriguing story. And then just when it appears as if this is going to be entirely Bale’s movie, the film introduces Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe, who slots in neatly alongside his co-star.

'The Pale Blue Eye' follows a local detective and Edgar Allan Poe investigating a series of gruesome murders. So, who is the killer? Spoilers ahead!

[Fred Hechinger](https://www.distractify.com/p/does-the-cat-die-in-woman-in-the-window)) also raped his daughter, so he tortures and murders him as well. [Gillian Anderson](https://www.distractify.com/p/why-does-gillian-anderson-have-a-british-accent)), Lea drugs Poe and begins the supernatural ritual. However, he ultimately decides Landor has been through enough and burns the evidence. As it turns out, Landor is the killer in The Pale Blue Eye. [Harry Lawtey](https://www.distractify.com/p/harry-lawtey-dating)) are responsible for Leroy Fry's death (or are they?), having cut his heart out to cast the life-saving spell. This time, Landor cut the heart out to make it seem like the work of a sadistic serial killer. [The Pale Blue Eye](https://www.distractify.com/p/the-pale-blue-eye-review), is finally here. This becomes the perfect opportunity for Landor to lay the blame on someone else. He spends much of the film mourning, claiming his daughter Mattie ran away with a man. Luckily, detective Landor arrives just in time and saves Poe. She soon contacts a deceased relative who dabbled in witchcraft, and he convinces Lea a human heart will cure her. Lea Marquis (

The impressionistic tale of a young Edgar Allan Poe may not be based in fact, but it captures the essence of the young writer.

Yet bringing them together in this way tips The Pale Blue Eye into ludicrous, overlong melodrama. Henry Melling – known to viewers as Dudley Dursey of the The acting, which is mainly excellent, becomes hammy. As more murders ensue, the mystery deepens. Auguste Dupin (whose name Bale’s Augustus Landor partially evokes). The body is found hanging from a tree by the banks of the Hudson. His rib cage has been surgically ripped open and the heart removed. [cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s](https://variety.com/2012/film/news/takayanagi-japanese-transplant-captures-extreme-conditions-1118049919/) evocative palette, where the pale blue cloaks of the West Point cadets contrast with the monochrome winter setting. The specific image of a pale blue eye is evoked by the seductive Lea Marquis’s (Lucy Boynton) eyes and the “piercing look” of detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale). [crop up repeatedly](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/439628) in Poe’s work: [occult ritual and cryptograms](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-cipher-from-poe-solved/), the border between sanity and insanity, the image of the [beautiful dead woman](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=090diHhmp40C&printsec=front_cover&redir_esc=) – which Poe notoriously described as “the most poetical topic in the world”. [The Tell-Tale Heart](https://poemuseum.org/the-tell-tale-heart/), the story of a man so disturbed by a lodging house mate’s pale blue “vulture eye” that he kills him and dismembers his body so he can hide it under the floorboards. [Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe's writings to solve the mystery of his death](https://theconversation.com/depression-and-language-analysing-edgar-allan-poes-writings-to-solve-the-mystery-of-his-death-131421)

The Pale Blue Eye movie review: A gothic mystery that not only owes a great creative debt to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe but also features him as a ...

The only time that Cooper displays any sort of levity in this movie is in his direction of Melling. The supporting cast is filled out by excellent character actors such as Tobey Jones, who plays the coroner; Simon McBurney, who plays a captain; and Timothy Spall, who drops by as the captain’s superior. Landor is described in a convenient early exposition dump as a widower who is particularly adept at ‘gloveless interrogations’. He’s someone who doesn’t take things at face value, which makes him a fun foil to the rather austere Augustus. This, by the way, happens an hour after Robert Duvall has dropped by as a tattooed puzzle solver named Jean-Pepe who studies the occult in his spare time. In fact, he’s spent the entirety of his directorial career making grim dramas — three of which have now starred

'A film shouldn't be like an enema,' says writer-director Scott Cooper. Here's how he and frequent collaborator Christian Bale stretched its suspense.

“We wanted it to feel bare, unforgiving and brutal, with a very narrow color palette, almost shooting the film in black and white,” Cooper says. “It was a brutal shoot,” Cooper says. “It made it memorable,” recalls Bale. “Somebody as intense and masculine as Landor is realizing that he’s missed a great deal in assuming that he has time,” Bale says. “He approached him as someone warm, witty and humorous, prone to poetic and romantic flourishes, looking for a connection.” “So lifelike that I would look over at one of the actors looking at his cadaver, and you could see them having an unsettling out-of-body experience. “And Christian is on that ledge with me [to] explore the darker corners of the human psyche.” “When I started to look at his work with more intention, it was a surprise [to discover] how much he has infiltrated culture and my brain without me even knowing that it was him doing so. Cooper has been contemplating the chief questions of “The Pale Blue Eye” since reading it after directing his first film, The gentle yet opinionated loner — not the “Master of the Macabre” just yet — teams up with Landor for the investigation. To become legendary, you have to be a keen, invisible observer and not be a part of the story, which Christian did beautifully.” Transport the audience somewhere, “The Pale Blue Eye” does.

Filmmaker Scott Cooper's latest is a gothic thriller about a grizzled detective (Bale) and the young poet investigating a series of brutal killings.

His movies are more coherent for their actorly musculature than for ins and outs and of the stories he tells, and The Pale Blue Eye is no different. The actor starred in Cooper’s Out of the Furnace (2013) and Hostiles (2017). The offense is that it does so in service of a mystery that barely matters. So it’s up to the rest of this dreary set to get our minds going, a job that they only barely get to do, in a movie that does not always seem confident in how and whether it aims to please us. The Pale Blue Eye, written and directed by Scott Cooper and based on the 2003 Louis Bayard novel of the same name, is only ostensibly a movie about a mystery. If he weren’t Edgar Allan Poe, he’d seem like a plant: a character whose strangeness is meant to attract our suspicion, to the benefit of the more obvious crook drifting somewhere in the shadows, pulling the strings. Well, and maybe for the pleasure of his hifalutin drawl, the general Old South essence of his company, which stands out as exotic in the Hudson Valley and has accordingly made him a target among his peers. Really, it’s a movie fixated on the spindly strangeness of the poet somewhat at its center, who’s only recruited into Landor’s company, at first, for the sake of his gothic instincts. And he’s seen enough death, one presumes, that the spookiness of this endeavor, wherein the body count is sure to increase, probably won’t get to him. That means he’s perfect for the job: he has no one and nothing to lose. The coroner and others will eventually discover that the man’s heart has been stolen from his chest and a portion of a note, yet to be deciphered, has been hidden away, clutched in the dead man’s hardened grip. It’s 1830 on the snowy New York campus of the United States Military Academy and a young cadet has been found hanged.

Backstage OL's Dave Morales sits down with the cast of Kaleidoscope and previews the new movie.

John Fetterman officially became the 54th senator in Pennsylvania history this week. But courtesy of Netflix, he can add another job to his resume: Actor.

[ made a cameo in 2005′s Wedding Crashers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/john-mccain-dead-5-memorable-cameos-tv-shows-movies-1137309/saturday-night-live-2002/). [as Fetterman tweeted last month](https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1601282214226165760), his wife Gisele also makes a cameo in The Pale Blue Eye. ... That’s a face that fits in the 1830s.’” She is possibly in the background of one scene in the same tavern about 45 minutes after Fetterman appears, though if it’s her, the background is too out of focus to conclusively tell. After all, looking for a senator in the film already broke the fourth wall plenty for us. We clocked him in one scene early in the film, when Bale’s character goes to a tavern after starting his murder investigation.