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.

Film Review - Knives Out (12A)

This is a twisted web, and we are not finished untangling it. Not yet.

The big-screen whodunit was a fixture of my youth. Peter Ustinov and Angela Lansbury were Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple respectively in star-strewn campy Agatha Christie adaptations, though none of those outings had the class of Sidney Lumet's 1974 Murder on the Orient Express. Thirty years later Kenneth Branagh remade Orient Express as a glitzy holiday-season spectacular. It was a fun throwback for sure, but ultimately too shallow and underwritten to fully satisfy. For that we needed writer/director Rian Johnson and his entirely original - if Christie-inspired - Knives Out. It's the who-(and why and how)-dunit we didn't know we were waiting for. But trust me, we all secretly were.

On the night of his 85th birthday (and in the first two minutes of the film) crime-writer and family patriarch Harlan Thrombey dies violently in his sprawling family home. The police are leaning towards suicide as cause, but renowned gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) senses that the finger of blame points elsewhere. The Thrombey clan are an eccentric and entitled bunch, bristling with secrets and grudges. Not even their meek immigrant health-care worker Marta (Ana de Armas) is a totally open book. Somewhere among the liberally scattered clues and red herrings lies the truth - but even the greatest sleuthing mind of his generation will be hard-pressed to uncover it.

That Rian Johnson knows his murder mystery classics is evident from the very beginning of Knives Out. The movie's opening act is physically constructed from Christie tropes, starting with the location. Thrombey mansion is an arcane Gothic pile, its interior a lavishly over-designed warren of secrets, all of it littered with bizarre collectables that writer Harlan seems to have conjured from his own thrillers. There's a body as well, a brilliant detective with a Gallic name and a clutch of family members whose potentially homicidal motives are uncovered in the opening interviews. It's all as Agatha as a story can get, with shows like Murder She Wrote playing in the background, just in case we didn't feel sufficiently steeped in Christie-esque murder fiction. (Even the publicity stills show the suspects decked in primary colours straight from Clue.)

And then when we think we know what we've got, Johnson delivers a reveal that pulls the whole whodunit format fully inside out. It's a genius move - delivering information we feel we have no business knowing this early on, putting us ahead of the game (though maybe not as far as we think), before we get blindsided by further twists that sends the plot spinning off in new, mad, exhilerating directions. The narrative is an extended exercise in genre subversion, backed up with a joyously witty and cunning script and some of the funniest moments in cinema this year. (These include the most memorable 'tell' with which any would-be liar could be cursed.) There's suspense too, long-time Johnson collaborator Steve Yedlin snaking his camera through the mansion to capture every crucial detail. Hint - don't let your attention drop for a second.

The ensemble cast clearly relishes the opportunity to be part of such juicy fun, not least Craig. His laconic detective is an enigma in himself, one with an outrageous southern drawl and a whimsical sense of philosophy. (You'll genuinely want to follow Benoit Blanc's succeeding cases, so engaging is his presence.) The Thrombeys are a vivid and distinctively drawn bunch; the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon and Toni Collette revel in their often grotesque characters, while Chris Evans turns his Captain America image gleefully on its head as a pampered trust-fund playboy. Christopher Plummer (pushing 90) gives great flashback as the soon-to-be-deceased head of the Thrombey empire, while de Armas (Blade Runner 2049) leads us into the heart of the investigation  - in more ways than one - as the massively endearing Marta. 

It should come as small surprise that the man who crafted genre-twisting pieces like high-school noir Brick and time-travel thriller Looper should now bring us Knives Out. In two crammed hours he deconstructs the whole murder-mystery thriller and puts it back together again in a way that interlocks perfectly, while satirising money, class and bitchy privilege along the way. It's a terrific crowd-pleasing achievement and even the percentage of Star Wars fans who hated his divisive Last Jedi might find it in their hearts to forgive him. They really should do. Johnson's crafty new film is just plain excellent.

Gut Reaction: Laughter from the gut, dropped jaw and the warm satisfaction of a brilliant tale concluded to plotting perfection.

Memorable Moment: The one where all your expectations go out an upper storey window. WT serious F???

Ed's Verdict: 9/10. Devious and hilarious, this is an intricate puzzle-box of a movie with a whole lot of brain and significantly more emotion than you'd expect. Whether or not you like Poirot and Marple, you'll find this a murderously delicious holiday treat.