Scott Cooper knows a good idea when he sees it. As much as I’ve been pretty lukewarm on the films of his I’ve reviewed in Black Mass and Antlers, they’re both built on sturdy foundations. With the former, it was a different take on the standard crime drama that must’ve clung to Joel Edgerton’s brain since then, seeing as his recent turn in The Stranger turned out quite similar in purpose and thematic drive. And with the latter, it was a creature feature that used a wendigo as a monster metaphor for parental abuse and the trauma associated with it; a properly fascinating direction to take such things. And with his latest, he’s found another potential gold mine in the 2003 Louis Bayard novel The Pale Blue Eye, a detective story set on the American frontier and co-starring Edgar Allen Poe, serving as much a tribute to his style of American Gothic horror as it is to his lineage as the godfather of detective fiction at large.
Of course, this also brings in the main problem I keep running into with Scott Cooper as a filmmaker: He can recognise good story ideas, but isn’t necessarily well-equipped to make the most out of them on the screen. Black Mass, in better hands, could’ve been the gangster answer to Citizen Kane with its storytelling, but Cooper kept settling for more bog-standard tropes within the genre. And in Antlers, he kept burying the best aspects of the story underneath everything else he wanted to get into, watering down the potent ideas at its core. And unfortunately, the same is true of this, which shows Cooper once again losing track of the story’s strong point in favour of… well, just more of the usual.
I mean, the atmosphere of the film is beautifully executed. DP Masanobu Takayanagi gives the snow-covered landscape of West Point, New York, a sense of foreboding and dread, putting his experience with frostbit tension from back in The Grey to good use. Same goes the actors filling up the space, from Christian Bale giving a bit of Gotham By Gaslight as the main detective, to Harry Melling’s awkward and lively turn as Poe. While some of them lean a bit too much into camp to fit the setting (Gillian Anderson especially, as fun as she is on-screen), they help bring out the Tim Burton’s Sleep Hollow-esque crossbreeding of murder mystery and Gothic horror.
The main idea here is one close to Poe’s heart of hearts, that being the human obsession with death. At many turns, including with Poe, naturally, we see characters driven by their connection with departed loved ones. The film is somewhat vague about just how literal the connection is in places, given its delving into witchcraft, and it works to the story’s benefit because its facticity isn’t even really the point; it’s that, one way or another, the dead still have a hold on the living. And while it can drive some people to want to do right by those they continue to carry in their hearts, it can lead others to drastic measures in an attempt to avoid joining them just yet.
But for as much potential as there is here, it’s mostly let down by the pacing and tone that Cooper delivers it with. It’s a slow-burn thriller, but it becomes so laborious that any sense of tension drifts away in the breeze, making any and all clues that are picked up along the way feel superfluous. This isn’t helped by the film’s final act, which admittedly ramps up the excitement, but also manages to deliver not one but two ridiculous plot twists that render the whole affair down to a convoluted mess. None of this is helped by how both twists are made whole-cloth from fridging, and particularly lazy fridging at that.
As a depiction of Edgar Allen Poe at a formative point in his biography, I’ll admit that this does well at showing the morbid fascinations and social alienation that would help fuel his later works of art. Seeing him get all spirited when describing his process of reconstructed a half-destroyed piece of writing, or reciting a dirty poem over a drink at the pub, continues to show that Harry Melling has earned his stripes as a character actor worth respecting. But as a larger story with him as one of the narrative cogs, it feels misjudged and struggling to find a good meeting point between its intersection of genres. Not exactly the note I wanted to end 2022 on when it comes to theatrical releases.
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