The Pale Blue Eye review – a flat literary origin story for Edgar Allen Poe

Did we really need an origin story for Edgar Allen Poe? Whatever the answer, that is the tale provided by Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s novel The Pale Blue Eye that, much like the ill-advised Emily earlier this year, flattens the idea of literary inspiration into simple biography. Where Frances O’Connor’s film filled in its fictionalised gaps with moments from Wuthering Heights, so too does The Pale Blue Eye riff on The Tell-Tale Heart, to mostly nonsensical effect.

However, Poe (played by Harry Melling) is not quite the hero of this tale. That dubious honour goes to Inspector Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a former constable hired to solve a grisly murder of a US Army cadet at West Point in 1830s New York State. The young man has been found hanged and with his heart cut out, and it’s up to Landor to delve into the sordid pasts and secret societies of the troops and their families to catch the sadistic killer.

He’s aided in this endeavour by Poe, who – true to reality – is himself one of the West Point cadets, unpopular but just charismatic enough to serve as Landor’s mole within the institution. Suspects lurk everywhere, from the bullyish fellow cadets to the strange family of the institute’s live-in doctor Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones, miscast) to Poe himself, whose resentments and poetic sensibilities mark him as a potentially dangerous outsider.

It’s an initially juicy mystery, but one that peters out relatively quickly. Both the second and third acts drag on for too long, and the finale is ridiculous and ultimately unsatisfying, wasting the unique Victorian military setting in favour of a conclusion that is more generic and less believable. It does all look very nice, though, the big Netflix budget allowing Cooper to build a lived-in and wintry world full of rugged, candlelit buildings and visually impressive set-pieces, especially during the search for a missing cadet, where the sea of bright blue Army uniforms lights up a barren forest.

While he is a Cooper regular, it’s tough to see what drew Bale to this role of Landor outside of this nicely realised old world. He’s never bad here, but never great either, given little memorable to do, especially next to Melling’s far more entertaining and colourful performance as Poe. Outside of this leading duo, the rest of the cast are pretty uniformly poor. As a little-seen love interest for Landor, Charlotte Gainsbourg is woefully under-utilised, whilst Gillian Anderson gives a grating performance straight out of an entirely different film. The miscasting of the very British Jones is not a problem just for his character either, with Simon McBurney and Timothy Spall – playing the senior officers at West Point – also failing to convince as American military men.

It’s a crying shame, as The Pale Blue Eye could have been a great Christmas regular for those looking for a bit more bite with their festive entertainment. Snowy and spooky and twisty, it’s got plenty of the key ingredients for Christmas Eve viewing, but its lumpen pacing, dim conclusion, and feeble ensemble prove an inevitably lethal combination.

The Pale Blue Eye is released in UK cinemas on 23 December.