Cadet after cadet is found hanged. At first it looks like suicide, but then … the gory discovery is made that each dead man’s heart has been neatly cut out of his chest.
Renowned detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a sad widower, jaded, boozy, mourning his daughter who has mysteriously run off, is brought in to discover the truth. He’s a bit of a Poirot but more human, with a tendency to be outspoken, lacking Poirot’s impeccably good judgment.
Landor enlists Cadet Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) as his assistant, knowing Poe has been less than truthful about his connections with the dead cadets. Nevertheless Poe, an outsider, not as good looking as the other cadets but more academically able, becomes Landor’s spy, cleverly deducing that the killer must be a poet. Well, he should know: the real Poe, who incidentally was briefly a cadet at West Point, was a poet himself. But don’t expect a Poe biopic. The only Poe facts in the film are that Poe attended West Point Academy and that the title’s words “the pale blue eye” are in Poe’s famous story The Tell-Tale Heart.
Senior officers Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) and Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall) become frustrated by Landor who seems to be going about his work too slowly, and they don’t like it when Landor insinuates that the academy itself is to blame for the cadets’ deaths. “I do believe,” Landor drawls, “that the academy takes away the young man’s will. Advances him with regulations and rules. Deprives him of reason.”
Many clues and red herrings pile up. Robert Duvall appears in a cameo as an expert in the occult. Dr Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones, quirky as ever), the academy’s doctor, knows more than he lets on, as does his rakish son, Cadet Artemis Marquis (Harry Lawtey). And what’s the doctor’s moody wife Julia (Gillian Anderson, looking and sounding quite a lot like Margaret Thatcher in The Crown) up to?
When Cadet Poe falls in love with the beautiful but tormented Lea Marquis (Lucy Boynton), sister of Artemis, the audience is concerned for him. Hasn’t he noticed that something’s amiss with the whole Marquis family, including lovely Lea?
Director Scott Cooper ,who adapted Louis Bayard’s 2003 book for the screen, has fictional Poe’s dead mother appearing to him in a dream, reciting a poem, incidentally written for the film, about a pale blue eye. When Poe confides in Lea about his dream, it’s clear all will not be well, but nobody expects the horrifically gory Gothic scene — Poe enthusiasts will appreciate the nod to The Pit and the Pendulum — in which the truth is revealed.
But hang about, there’s yet another angle that changes everything in this gripping tall tale, with its top-notch cast and absorbing plot twists.
Highly recommended.
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