Moody, gloomy, and chillier than the Hudson river in wintertime, Netflix's clever new
detective thriller, The Pale Blue Eye, builds to a stunning and emotional twist.
The big twist in The Pale Blue Eye, which Poe helpfully spells out for us in a monologue,
is that Landor is the killer of both cadets Fry and Ballinger.
Fry, Ballinger, and a third cadet named Stoddard sexually assaulted Landor's daughter Mattie
years before the events of the movie.
Mattie managed to grab Fry's dog tag, which led Landor to eventually lure him to the woods
with a note and strangle him.
Fry's diary, in turn, gave Landor the identity of the other two attackers.
After he killed Ballinger, Stoddard ran away, fearing for his life.
After piecing together scattered information about how Mattie had "run off" from the townsfolk,
Poe realizes the killer's true identity when he compares the note Landor left for him with
the scrap of paper found in the dead Fry's hand.
The Pale Blue Eye turns on an enormous coincidence – that Landor would be called to investigate
Fry's murder, mere hours after committing it himself – but as many characters note,
his reputation as a crime-solver precedes him.
"Is it true you once elicited a confession with nothing more than a piercing look?"
Landor is able to get away with murder in large part because of the actions of the Marquis
family, perhaps the most Gothic American family not named Addams.
Daughter Lea suffers from a "falling disease" – epilepsy, in modern-day terms – and
her father, Dr. Marquis, has exhausted all of 1830's medicine attempting to treat it.
Finally, with his blessing and the participation of Lea's creepy brother Artemus and high-strung
mother Julia, the family has turned to devil worship to treat her symptoms.
"I sacrificed everything for my Lea, so how could I then object to her finding a cure
elsewhere?"
As Landor and Poe learn via a book of arcane information about witches, they require a
heart from a hanged man for their magic.
So the night Fry is killed, Artemus uses his uncle's old officer's coat to dismiss the
cadet guarding the body and remove its heart, throwing everyone off Landor's trail.
Landor later removes Ballinger's heart and the hearts of local livestock to give credence
to the perception that there's a madman on the loose.
One of the chief pleasures of The Pale Blue Eye is the way it exists as a pastiche of
what we know will be recurring themes in the real Edgar Allan Poe's work.
"I've learned more in rooms like this than any classroom."
You could think of the film as sort of a prequel or superhero origin story for Poe.
His brief and doomed romance with Lea inspires him to recite a poem – a fictional one by
novelist Louis Bayard – that references both "Lenore" and the "pale blue eye" that
gives the story its title.
"Endless night caught her then in its slurry, shrouding all but her pale blue eye."
The name "Lenore" was often used by real-world Poe in his work, usually when a poem's narrator
mentions a doomed, lost love.
Over the course of his life, Poe lost his birth mother, adoptive mother, and wife to
premature deaths, so Lea fits right into a pattern of pale, sickly muses for Poe's macabre
work.
It's no wonder that it's love at first sight.
The phrase "pale blue eye" appears in Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," in reference
to the murder victim whose heart drives the narrator mad from beneath the floorboards,
so ascribing it to Lea in The Pale Blue Eye foreshadows her premature death and grisly
association with excised hearts.
The morning after Ballinger attacks Poe in the woods for his interest in Lea, he's found
hanged and mutilated.
This casts suspicion on Poe, who was understandably angry, but it's yet another red herring.
As we learn, Landor killed the arrogant and aggressive cadet.
But what's inexplicable is the fact that Ballinger didn't destroy Fry's diary, which implicated
him in the attack on Mattie.
By sending it to Fry's mother instead of just burning it, Ballinger marked himself for a
brutal death.
We don't get to know Ballinger particularly well, so we don't know what motivates him
to send the diary to Fry's mother, along with a note that implies she may wish to burn it.
There's no way he could have known that she would, instead, innocently hand it over to
the very man that killed her son, then come after him.
But it's at best unwise to leave it out there.
Although The Pale Blue Eye has been modestly successful with critics, the performances
of Christian Bale and Harry Melling have been overlooked this awards season.
In a dense screenplay that reveals little of either character's inner life, the bond
between the retired detective and the odd young cadet is given depth and warmth by the
actors.
"Harry Melling.
Well beyond my imagination.
Bringing the Poe that I envisioned to life."
And it really hits when Poe realizes he's been used by Landor to frame the Marquis family
for his misdeeds.
It's a shocking betrayal, but it's not entirely clear why Landor enlisted Poe's assistance
to begin with.
When he learns Fry's heart has gone missing, Landor perhaps intuitively realizes that the
organ thieves might provide him the exact cover he needs to kill his daughter's other
attackers.
He then recruits the bright young poet hoping that he was clever enough to solve that mystery,
but not so clever that he would put the entire situation together.
It nearly worked, but in letting his guard down about Mattie he revealed too much to
his new protégé.
The Pale Blue Eye maintains an unsettling aura of mystery by never revealing exactly
what the Marquis family does with the stolen hearts.
It's some sort of occult ritual that involves a "magic circle" and leaves a fair amount
of blood behind.
Dr. Marquis believes his daughter is communing with the spirits of the dead — epilepsy
has historically been associated with seeing visions and hearing voices, and many contemporary
psychiatrists believe Joan of Arc suffered from it — but he doesn't think his children
are capable of murder.
Luckily for Landor, they graduate to attempted murder and are on the verge of cutting out
Poe's still-beating heart when he discovers them in the icehouse.
Even more conveniently, both Lea and Artemus die in the ensuing fire when a candle gets
knocked over.
The siblings assume the blame for Landor's crimes as they're no longer alive to defend
themselves.
There comes a point in The Pale Blue Eye when it appears that Poe himself might be the murderer.
It's almost obligatory in a story where a legendarily death-obsessed figure like Poe
is a major character.
After all, his dead mother dictates poems to him while he sleeps.
"My mother has a kind of presence in my life.
My sleepings and my awakenings."
And the film opens with a quote from the real Poe musing:
"The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague.
Who's to say where one ends, and where the other begins?"
But it's ultimately just a brief misdirect when we find out that Poe lied about having
dealings with the deceased Fry in the past.
Coming on the heels of Ballinger's murder after he and Poe fought, it seems like Poe
might be settling personal vendettas.
But Landor is skeptical, even when the West Point bosses insist on Poe's arrest, and takes
Poe at his word when he sheepishly admits that Fry was just one of the plethora of fellow
cadets that had bullied him for his awkward, bookish ways in the past year.
If he killed every bully at West Point, the academy would be virtually empty.
In movies, it's not always a bad thing to commune with the dead.
Perhaps you can party with them, like in Beetlejuice, or maybe your dead mother writes poetry for
you.
Poe's does in The Pale Blue Eye.
But Lea Marquis' mentor from the other side, her great-great-grandfather Henri Le Clerc,
prefers blood sacrifice.
In another of the story's astonishing coincidences, the very same misunderstood devil-worshiping
witch hunter Le Clerc that Landor's friend, Jean-Pepe, mentions turns out to be a direct
ancestor of the Marquis family.
The other witch hunter and demonologist Jean-Pepe mentions, Pierre de Lancre, did exist and
preside over mass witch trials in 17th-century France, but was reviled for practicing the
"witches' sabbath," the exact sort of occult ritual that inspired the Marquis family.
Like the work of the real Edgar Allan Poe, The Pale Blue Eye explores the thin line between
religious piety and communing with death itself, with an emphasis on the macabre.
Edgar Allan Poe is probably most famous for his poetry, made iconic for a new generation
of audiences thanks to the pitch-perfect interpretation of The Raven in a "Treehouse of Horror" installment
of The Simpsons.
"Nevermore nevermore nevermore never–"
But he's also credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction.
Before Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, or Hercule Poirot, Poe's inspector C. Auguste Dupin appeared
in his 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue and established all the hallmarks
of the detective story before the word "detective" was even in regular use.
This knowledge adds a fun and touching subtext to The Pale Blue Eye.
At one point, while drinking together in the local tavern, Poe, clearly excited to be working
with the renowned Inspector Landor, makes a bold claim.
"I shall write a poem someday, something that shall send your name down through the ages."
For the 20-year-old, an as-yet unsuccessful character, a dreamer, it's an ambitious promise,
but from our perspective, it's easy to trace the name "Augustus Landor" to "C. August Dupin,"
and imagine it as a tribute to an old friend.
The movie's Poe seemingly goes on to immortalize Landor's deductive logic in prose, not quite
poetry, leaving out his murderous tendencies for good measure.
After Poe's speech piecing the whole puzzle together followed by Landor's weary confession,
Poe asks a heavy question.
"So what now?"
Landor leaves the decision up to his new young friend, pointing out that he holds the only
evidence that links him to the murders of Fry and Ballinger in the form of the notes
that Landor left for Fry and Poe himself.
Wordlessly, Poe burns the evidence and resolves to let Landor go free, causing the exhausted,
grief-stricken father to break into tears of anguished relief.
As an orphan haunted by death himself, Poe perhaps knows that the acts of murder that
Landor has committed will haunt him more than any kind of societal justice ever will.
It's a heavy, quietly devastating scene, as the act of mercy is overshadowed by the grim
nature of what Landor has been through, as well as the sad fact of Poe departing his
life for good.
In another life, Landor speculates aloud, Mattie might have run into Poe the night of
the ball instead of her assailants, and he'd have a happy daughter and son-in-law instead
of a life filled with death and sadness.
Cristian Bale and Harry Melling, as Landor and Poe respectively, acquit themselves spectacularly
well, weeping silent tears in turn as the melancholy becomes too much for them to bear.
The Pale Blue Eye draws to a close with Landor returning to the cliff's edge where Mattie
leaped to her death.
With his wife and daughter dead, and Mattie's attackers either dead or on the run, Landor
faces an uncertain future.
Poe has spared him even the mixed solace of wasting away in prison, so it's natural to
suspect he's considering joining his daughter in death.
Like the ending of The Sopranos, it's impossible to know exactly what happens after the movie
cuts to black, but it seems like The Pale Blue Eye errs on the side of hope.
With a calm voice, Landor releases one of Mattie's ribbons into the wind and finally
says goodbye.
"Rest, my love."
The events of the movie have left with him some semblance of closure — especially the
decision not to pursue Stoddard, which signals acceptance on Landor's part more than it does
despair.
Perhaps influenced by Poe's unique views on the thin veil between life and death, he feels
no need to hurry his own demise and join his family.