An overacted, badly written, murder mystery dud, “The Pale Blue Eye” takes its title from a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 Boston-set story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe himself is also a character in the film, an adaptation of the 2006 novel by Louis Bayard adapted by writer-director Scott Cooper (“Antlers,” “Black Mass”). The film’s action is set beneath an iron winter sky in 1830 at the United States Military Academy, West Point, where Poe is a cadet, in a snow-covered, densely-wooded Hudson Valley, New York. After an apparent suicide of a cadet, academy leaders Colonel Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) hire celebrated, detective Augustus Landor (a bearded Christian Bale) to get the bottom of the dark, blood-spattered mystery.
As it turns out, the body of the deceased was mutilated by someone after death. The victim’s heart was “carved from his chest,” Upon arrival at the academy, Landor, a widower whose only child, a daughter named Mathilde “ran off,” meets the academy’s physician Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). The doctor’s entire family resides at the academy, including his fraught wife (an apoplectic Gillian Anderson), cadet son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) and beautiful, ailing daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton).
Landor, whose first name recalls Poe’s fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and other stories, claims that he does not read poetry or fiction. He enlists Cadet Poe (Harry Melling aka Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” films) to work for him undercover.
