ThePaleBlueEye is an enjoyably spooky gothic thriller.
The Pale Blue Eye Score Details “Director Scott Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye is a fun, atmospheric gothic thriller that falls well short of greatness but still features two standout lead performances from Harry Melling and Christian Bale.” Pros Cons The Pale Blue Eye is a visually rich, intentionally tricky gothic thriller.
The Pale Blue Eye’s winking love for the macabre is evident in its opening shot, which slowly peels away several layers of fog to reveal the crooked silhouette of a dead man hanging from the branches of a bare tree. From there, the film, which is based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name, follows Augustus Landor , a prickly private detective, as he is hired by a pair of West Point officials to look into said hanged man’s suspected murder.
What emerges as the real emotional core of The Pale Blue Eye isn’t Poe’s romance with Lea, but the father-son bond that slowly but surely develops between Melling’s boisterous poet and Bale’s mournful detective. Together, Bale and Melling make for a compelling, watchable pair. Bale, for his part, brings the same kind of gruffness and cynicism to his performance as Landor that he has in both of his previous films with Cooper.
Unfortunately, none of the other performances in The Pale Blue Eye work as well as Melling’s and Bale’s do. Despite featuring a murderers’ row of Hollywood character actors, including Timothy Spall, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, and Simon McBurney, many of The Pale Blue Eye’s supporting players either fail to match the tone and energy of Cooper’s script or are left stranded playing underwritten characters.
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