Netflix today released The Pale Blue Eye trailer featuring Christian Bale and Harry Melling. You can check out The Pale Blue Eye trailer below and keep scrolling for new character posters.
West Point, 1830. In the early hours of a gray winter morning, a cadet is found dead. But after the body arrives at the morgue, tragedy becomes savagery when it’s discovered that the young man’s heart has been skillfully removed.
Fearing irreparable damage to the fledgling military academy, its leaders turn to a local detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to solve the murder.
Stymied by the cadets’ code of silence, Landor enlists the help of one of their own to pursue the case, an eccentric cadet with a disdain for the rigors of the military and a penchant for poetry – a young man named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).
The Pale Blue Eye is based on the novel The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard (buy now) and is directed by Scott Cooper.
The film stars an acclaimed supporting cast, including Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Hadley Robinson, Timothy Spall and Robert Duvall.
“Edgar famously had a very big forehead,” Harry Melling told Netflix’s Tudum of his casting in an interview. “Now I thought my forehead may be sufficient in size, but we decided, ‘No, no, if we’re going to make a choice, let’s go for it.'”
The Pale Blue Eye follows veteran detective August Landor (Christian Bale) as he hunts the perpetrator of a series of cold-blooded murders at West Point military academy. Along the way, he befriends Melling’s Poe, already chafing at the school’s restrictions.
When Melling first read the script, he found its fusion of fact and fiction thrilling. “I thought, ‘What a great idea to take a historical truth and then to weave this Edgar Allan Poe narrative through that,'” he says.
“And what better genre to choose than a detective story, seeing as Edgar was the godfather of the detective story.”
To portray the esteemed author of such macabre classics as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart, Melling dove deep into research on Poe’s life and discovered a few things he didn’t expect — especially about Poe’s early days, which the film chronicles.
“In terms of his time at West Point, I just loved the fact that he went there because he thought, ‘Oh, this is a great place – I can just kind of sit around and write,’ which is just hilarious because he did anything but,” Melling says.
“He was doing drills all the time. He was doing classes. The one thing he didn’t have any time for was writing.”
The Pale Blue Eye is produced by Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, Tyler Thompson, and John Lesher.
The movie is executive produced by Tracye Landon, Dylan Weathered, Louis Bayard, Chris Sharp, Jennifer Lamb, Emily Salveson, and Ryan Smith, with co-producers Catherine Farrell and Chris Surgent.
Are you excited to check out The Pale Blue Eye when it releases January 6, 2023 on Netflix? Let us on @vitalthrillscom. The film will play in select theaters starting December 23, 2022.
Jenna Busch has written and spoken about movies, TV, video games, and comics all over the Internet for over 15 years, co-hosted a series with Stan Lee, appeared on multiple episodes of “Tabletop,” written comic books, and is a contributing author for the 13 books in the “PsychGeeks” series including “Star Wars Psychology.” She founded the site Legion of Leia and hosted the “Legion” podcast.