Review: 'The Pale Blue Eye' circles its convoluted plot without finding a satisfying place to land

By Peter Travers

It's murder at West Point where a young Edgar Allen Poe is a cadet (for real) and the atmosphere is shrouded in mystery and madness. That alone makes "The Pale Blue Eye," now on Netflix, sound like the perfect gothic mesmerizer to curl up with on a cold winter night.

If only. Despite the star presence of the reliably compelling Christian Bale as the cop on the case and the young Poe acted to a bizarro tee by Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in five "Harry Potter" films), this murky muddle feels stifled by its gorgeous ambiance, not energized by it.

Based on the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard, "The Pale Blue Eye" features Bale as the fictional Augustus Landor, a former police detective living alone in a cottage in upstate New York, near the U.S. Miliary Academy at West Point with its sweeping views of the Hudson. The time is 1830 and Landor is still mourning the death of his wife and the disappearance of his daughter.

It's homicide that pulls Landor back in. A cadet has been found hanging from a tree with his heart surgically removed.

Scott Garfield/Netflix

Robert Duvall as Jean Pepe, Christian Bale as Augustus Landor and Harry Melling as Edgar Allen Poe in The Pale Blue Eye.

Bigwigs at the Point, led by Colonel Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney), need his murder solved quickly to avoid scandal and congressional pressure to close down the fledgling academy.

To help him break the code of silence among cadets, Landor enlists Poe, who only had a few poems published at the time. His days as a master of the macabre and detective fiction are still ahead, but his searching mind is a boon to Landor, who treats the 21-year-old Poe like a son.

Scott Garfield/Netflix

Christian Bale as Augustus Landor in The Pale Blue Eye.

Bale and Melling embark on a welcome duel of wits to flesh out a thin and dreary script about two hard-drinking misfits who can't find a place in society except with each other. There's nothing like a brutal murder or two to connect this pair of obsessives.

What a shame that writer-director Scott Cooper ("Crazy Heart") so utterly fails to build dramatic momentum. "The Pale Blue Eye" (the title comes from Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart") fares better as a character study in which major actors are cast even in minor roles.

Landor beds a bar wench (Charlotte Gainsbourg) while Poe develops a romantic fixation on Lea (Lucy Boynton), the sickly daughter of surgeon Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones) and his wife Julia (Gillian Anderson). The Marquis family harbors enough dark secrets to fill its own movie.

Scott Garfield/Netflix

Gillian Anderson as Julia and Toby Jones as Dr. Marquis in The Pale Blue Eye.

And you might wish it had. There's a hint of suspense when Lea's macho cadet brother Artemus (Harry Lawtey) gets drawn into the case. The great Robert Duvall also shows up as Jean Pepe, an occult expert brought in to investigate a rash of satanic rituals at the Point.

Intrigued? You should be. But Cooper, in his third collaboration with Bale after "Out of the Furnace" and "Hostiles," just plods along when we most want him to goose the film into action.

Scott Garfield/Netflix

Lucy Boynton as Lea, Fred Hechinger as Randolph Ballinger, Harry Melling as Edgar Allen Poe, Harry Lawtey as Artemus, Toby Jones as Dr. Marquis and Gillian Anderson as Julia in The Pale Blue Eye.

Even when the murderer kills again and characters start daubing their faces with blood and howling at the moon or whatever's handy, the film keeps circling its convoluted plot without finding a satisfying place to land.

By the time of a twist ending that's not tough to figure out, it's hard to care about characters so buried in oppressive gloom and doom.

Unnerving? Hardly. Unendurable is more like it.