2022 Catch-Up: The Pale Blue Eye (15)

 The heart is a symbol or it is nothing.

Gist: The year is 1830, the place West Point military academy, New York, and world-weary detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) has been summoned to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a young cadet. A verdict of suicide is rendered problematic by the fact that the corpse has been mutilated in macabre fashion. Senior officers want the mystery solved swiftly, but are perturbed when Landor enlists the help of a young private, with a poetic turn of mind, named Edgar Allan Poe. And as the truth unfolds, it proves as dark and twisted as anything of which young Poe's literary imagination will ever conceive.

Juice: The Pale Blue Eye is a snowbound January treat from director Scott Cooper, one best watched by a fire warm enough to thaw its icy Gothic chill. West Point in winter is a beautifully bleak setting for this morbid tale of human frailty and evil, the uniform blue of the cadets standing out against the crisp white backdrop. It's down to stark and spectacular camerawork from the sure hand of Masanobu Takayanagi, complimented by Howard Shore's epic lamentation of a score. The performances are chilly too. Christian Bale is at his most gruff and contained as the damaged detective, while a coterie of great character actors - Timothy Spall, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones - populate the military command with frosty skepticism. Lucy Boynton, meanwhile, is all pale reserve as a focal point of several characters' romantic attention, and Gillian Anderson delivers an altogether more gregarious and enjoyably scenery-chewing performance as the doctor's wife. But it's Harry Melling who stands out as the theatrical and morbidly romantic young Poe, adding humanity to the proceedings along with greater warmth (albeit a mite creepy) than all the ale he downs with Bale. The lad has come a long way from the Dursley household in Harry Potter, and his portrayal of the burgeoning literary genius is a big step along his road to acting greatness.

If the film has a drawback, it's the slow and meandering mid-section, one that pushes the story beyond a two-hour running time and loses along the way some of the plot momentum so briskly established in the opening. Compensation comes in the form of sheer melodrama in the movie's final stages, which deliver more plot layers than the snow blanketing West Point. This includes a twist you'll either embrace completely or dismiss as too damn much. I chose the former.

Judgement: 7.5/10. Director Cooper is no stranger to bleak stories - his western Hostiles, again with Bales, portrayed a brutal landscape - but The Pale Blue Eye has a specifically desolate beauty to it, while spinning a tale worthy of Edgar Allan himself. The film is an especial treat for lovers of American Gothic, leaning hard as it does into influences that might have shaped the writer of The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart. It takes its bitterly cold time, for sure, but makes it worth the while. So - throw a few extra logs on the fire, settle down with a snifter of something warming, and enjoy.