Last decade, Christian Bale and director Scott Cooper teamed up for two films, 2013’s “Out Of The Furnace” and 2017’s criminally underseen “Hostiles.” Now, they join forces again on “The Pale Blue Eye,” Cooper’s take on Louis Bayard‘s 2006 novel about a double murder at the West Point military academy in 1830. Vanity Fair’s first look at the film offers a glimpse at the period mystery thriller, which sees Bale’s detective come out of retirement to solve the murders thanks to a new protegé, Henry Melling‘s young Edgar Allan Poe.
Cooper’s latest film is a long-gestating passion project that the director worked on for almost a decade. “I thought, Okay, I have an opportunity to do three things with this film: Fashion a whodunit, a father and son love story, and then a Poe origin story,” said Cooper, who also adapts Bayard’s novel for the big screen. “Poe at this young age was quite warm and witty and humorous and very Southernly. The experiences that I’m putting forth in this film led him down the darker paths that we have come to know him for.”
In the film, Bale plays August Landor, a retired detective in upstate New York obsessed with modern forensics. The murders at West Point and their ritualistic style force Landor out of his idyll to solve the case. But Poe, a cadet at the military school, challenges Landor’s methods and instinct with his fascination with the uncanny and strange. “He dismisses him initially, but comes to find him to be the centerpiece of his life, which he would be quite embarrassed to admit, with his age and standing and everything,” Bale told VF about the dybamic between the two characters. “He does find himself maybe learning new things, and is certainly reminded of things that he’d forgotten about life.”
“The Pale Blue Eye” also features a formidable supporting cast along with Bale and Melling. For instance, Robert Duvall, now 91, and a longtime friend of Cooper’s, plays an elderly occult scholar who lives near the murder site. Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones also co-star as Dr. Daniel Marquis and his wife Julia, with Lucy Boynton and Harry Lawtey playing their children. Timothy Spall also stars as a West Point colonel who wants the murders solved discreetly. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Simon McBurney, Hadley Robinson, and Gideon Glick also have supporting roles.
But what separates “The Pale Blue Eye” from other mysteries and period pieces? For Bale, the film’s biggest strength lies in that virtually everyone in it is a suspect for the murders. “Every character in the story has secrets,” Bale said. “And while Poe seems to be the one who is clearly putting on a performance, he is actually the most sincere. Everyone else is more quietly putting on a performance, but no one is who they are pretending to be.” Cooper added that the movie’s strange characters will undoubtedly throw the audience off as to who’s behind the central crime.“There was a certain eccentricity with the Marquis family that I wanted to tap into,” Cooper said. “Both Gillian and Toby have been favorites of mine for quite some time. And I thought, what an odd pairing, these two. Like everybody in the film, they are hiding something behind this veil of eccentricity.”
So, who’s behind the double murder in Scott Cooper’s upcoming gothic mystery? Find out when “The Pale Blue Eye” hits Netflix on January 6, 2023. It also gets a limited theatrical release starting on December 23. Check out first-look photos from the film below.
