My first movie of 2023 was The Pale Blue Eye which I saw at the Broadway last night. This moody and atmospheric murder mystery was actually the perfect movie to see on a gloomy and snowy winter evening. World-weary detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is summoned to West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, in secret to solve the grisly murder of a cadet before bad publicity can shut the fledgling institution down in 1830. He is approached by another cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), who has some ideas about the case, and the two eventually work together. They begin to suspect that the occult is involved until Poe discovers the truth in a shocking twist. Bale is as compelling as always and the rest of the cast, which includes Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall, and Robert Duvall, is outstanding but Melling gives an absolutely brilliant performance as the young (and somewhat fictionalized) Poe. The bleak setting, the middle of winter in the Hudson valley, and the ominous tone really emphasize the brutality of the crime and I loved the cinematography, especially the overhead shots of snow-covered trees during the search for another missing cadet, the period costumes, and the haunting score. I also enjoyed the Gothic horror elements (I literally jumped out of my seat when a character walks down a foggy path in the middle of the night with just a lantern for illumination) but I think the story falls apart in the third act when this genre is abandoned in favor of a more mundane ending. Despite my disappointment with the resolution, I definitely think it is worth a watch when it starts streaming on Netflix this weekend.
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