Year Released: 2022
Directed by: Scott Cooper
Screenwriter: Tom Stoppard
Starring: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boyton, Toby Jones, Robert Duvall
(R, 130 min.)
Genre: Mystery and Suspense, Drama

“With enough patience, the suspect will often interrogate himself.” Detective Augustus Landor

Who could resist this premise? A young Edgar Allan Poe helps solve a grisly mystery while a young cadet at military school in the remote Hudson Valley of New York.

West Point, 1830. In the early hours of a gray winter morning, a cadet is found dead. But after the body arrives at the morgue, tragedy becomes savagery when it's discovered that the young man's heart has been skillfully removed. Fearing irreparable damage to the fledgling military academy, its leaders turn to a local detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to solve the murder. Stymied by the cadets' code of silence, Landor enlists the help of one of their own to pursue the case, an eccentric cadet with a disdain for the rigors of the military and a penchant for poetry -- a young man named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).

Edgar Allan Poe, great actor Christian Bale, with Robert Duvall, “The X-Files” Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones in the supporting cast. Very impressive, so say the least!

So Different Drummer was hooked from the onset. The acting is superb; Harry Melling playing Poe looks identical to him, if perhaps a bit old to be a cadet, and the austere winter Hudson Valley in New York State is almost a character itself.

But as one critic noted –and I’m paraphrasing here –it starts out as a pretty good Gothic horror flick, until it isn’t, and then it pretty much folds in on itself.

Yes, one too many twists and a rushed almost pasted on ending taint it for me, but not for everyone. Many critics liked it; yet even their praise is muted. Here is what some of them said. Damned with faint praise…

Its plot is riddled with holes and its ending is overcooked, but it’s packed with terrific actors and achieves the light chill of a Christmas ghost story. Not one Poe would have been proud to write, but perhaps the sort of thing he’d read on holiday. –Olly Richards

The Pale Blue Eye is all at once a melancholic romance, a revenger’s tragedy, and an intriguing mystery. Its one problem, though, is that it comes with a glacial pace to match its wintry setting. –Anton Bitell

If you put aside the frankly risible big reveal, the film still manages to be smarter and more original than most of the countless B movies produced by Hollywood right now. –Linda Merric

It’s beautiful writing and impeccable acting in a perfectly bleak and maudlin movie. –Kevin Maher

It’s a troupe in service of a story that’s only barely satisfying when it finally decides to tie up loose ends. The real pleasure, it turns out, was always meant to be the weirdos we met along the way. –K. Austin Collins

“The Pale Blue Eye” isn’t biography but invention, and Melling is the merry wind-up toy at its center. Watch it for him and for the way Bale anchors the younger man’s performance to the movie’s here and now. –Ty Burr

The movie honors the real-life figure who would, among other things, become the arguable creator of the American detective story, while in its own right turning a shudder-inducing light on the darker recesses of the human heart. –Glenn Kenny

And those are the positive Rotten Tomato Reviews! Now for the negative ones:

The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart. –Derek Smith

Those who are intrigued by the history of Old New York, and Poe, might respond to the film’s portrait of both. Those who insist on stories making total sense might need to chase The Pale Blue Eye with a cask of amontillado. –John Anderson

Christian Bale tries to solve a murder at West Point, circa 1830, with the help of young cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). But what should be a gothic mesmerizer ends up a dreary exercise to doom and gloom that’s an endurance test for audiences. –Peter Travis

While the picture looks wonderfully atmospheric throughout, with its frostbitten monochromes and consumptive colour palette, the story disintegrates into a lurid and rather silly final act. –Wendy Ide

A would-be-macabre mystery about hearts being ripped out, is a flatlined pulse and a puzzling absence of red meat. –Tim Robey

It’s one of those handsomely mounted period pieces that should get under your skin; instead, it slumps from scene to scene with little momentum or tension, remaining just this side of inert. –David Rooney

Lavishly appointed and stodgy as week-old Christmas pudding, “The Pale Blue Eye” is a pulpy murder mystery bristling with florid dialogue and supernatural flourishes. –Jeannette Catsoulis

You decide.

Kathy Borich, et al.
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