Review of The Pale Blue Eye (2022) by Hnestlyonthesly — 10 Jan 2023

This lazy adaptation of a novel by the same name is about as complex a murder mystery as a cheese sandwich. It’s the gothic horror equivalent of Patrick Star eating his own chocolate bar. It’s as if Christian Bale (playing a detective who lives basically on the campus of West Point where the crime has occurred) has walked into a phone booth with five of his closest associates and then declared, once the lights have flickered on and off, that he has a theory of the case for who in the city was responsible for bludgeoning one of the people in the booth with a telephone. We get it? It’s one of you? Or all of you? It doesn’t actually matter all that much what the permutation is for your motives, so much as we are surprised by how quickly we arrive upon the murderers without actually putting them away.

There is, of course, the glimmerings of a twist, much in the same vein as See How They Run, in which (SPOILERS), we briefly suspect that either Edgar Allen Poe!! (Oh did I forget to mention that the entire movie hinges on the promise that hte murder is going to be in Poe's aesthetic?) or Landon (Bale) has the means and the motive to have committed some heinous murders, but no matter, once we are in the room with the pentagram and the Latin chanting, it’s fairly clear that even if they are not directly responsible for the murders, our baddies are deserving of some comeuppance.

The cast is stacked for this progressively dumber historical drama: Christian Bale, Gillian Anderson, the omnipresent Harry Melling (of Dudley Dursley fame, Buster Scruggs, Queen’s Gambit, and the upcoming review I’ll do for the erotic? satire? of toxic masculinity? and West Side Story?, Please, Baby, Please), the ever-ready character actors Timothy Spall and Toby Jones, Fred Hechinger of White Lotus Season 1, and Lucy Boynton of Murder on the Orient Express, Sing Street, and Bohemian Rhapsody). My suspicion is that the expectations for this movie were spoiled by two different high water marks in supernatural murder mysteries of late. One, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country did a great job of taking the aesthetic of Arkham Horror and adapting it to the 1950s with magical realist elements in ways that commented on and critiqued the source material’s most salient issues with race while also generating new avenues for storytelling. Two, Netflix’s Wednesday updated that source material, which shares some of its gothic aesthetic with Edgar Allen Poe, but found ways to breathe new energy and humor into stories that had some near perfect screen adaptations 20 years ago. The Pale Blue Eye isn’t either of those.

In fact, if I were going to give you a place where you can confidently shut off your computer in order to hate the film marginally less than you might, I would say, leave after the burning building. There is nothing for you after that. If you have proceeded beyond that point, you are aware that the film finds a way to include a rape plot in the ninth inning which is neither interesting nor necessary. If that weren’t enough, the rape plot is capped off with a happy, deranged suicide, all of which feel completely out of left field and not in keeping with the themes of the rest of the story. The best parts of Edgar Allen Poe’s work are the supernatural elements, the weird visions and spooky vistations which bleed into the everyday world and darken it with their pall–the way that gothic horror can properly be understood as a reaction to the soaring Romantic landscapes and cluelessly naive pronouncements of the sublime in the supposedly virgin expanse of the American West at this time. The best parts of The Pale Blue Eye are the moments before you realize how small the confines of the mystery in which you’ve been placed.