Review: Historical mystery 'The Pale Blue Eye' is awash in melancholy, but in need of more tension

A brooding melancholy hangs over the historical murder mystery “The Pale Blue Eye,” and there’s nothing writer-director Scott Cooper can do to break through the fog and deliver something other than a somber, pedestrian costume drama.

The setting is New York’s Hudson Valley in 1830 — specifically, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. One dark night, a cadet is found hanging from a tree. The death could be counted as a suicide, another casualty of the rigors of cadet training, except for one thing: The next day, the officers discover the heart has been surgically removed from the dead cadet’s body.

The superintendent, Col Thayer — who was a real person (and is played here with cartoonish gruffness by Timothy Spall) — summons a nearby civilian, a retired New York City detective named Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to investigate the case. Landor consults with the academy’s physician, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), about the method of the cadet’s death and dissection, but has trouble getting much from the cadets.

The one cadet not committed to the code of silence is an oddball student, who volunteers his opinion to Landor that the killer must be a poet — which this cadet should know, since he’s a poet himself. The cadet introduces himself as Edgar A. Poe. Yes, that Edgar Allan Poe, the future writer of “The Raven” and other macabre tales. (Poe is played by Harry Melling, who has developed since his days as the bratty Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” films.)

Encouraged by Landor, Poe talks his way into a group of cadets with an interest in the supernatural. This group includes Dr. Marquis’ son, Artemus (Harry Lawtey), who invites Poe to dinner with the family, including Dr. Marquis’ wife Julia (Gillian Anderson) and their fragile daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) — on whom Poe develops a strong attraction, which irks another cadet, Ballinger (Fred Hechinger).

That’s a lot of characters, era setting and plot development, and Cooper (“Antlers,” “Hostiles,” “Out of the Furnace”), in adapting Louis Bayard’s novel doesn’t take shortcuts — though there are moments when a viewer might believe he should. The dramatic tension is bogged down in overly long exposition and oppressive camerawork.

It’s good that the movie doesn’t scrimp on space for Bale to give a lived-in, haunted performance as Landor, a man battling his demons and beset by memories of his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson). Her absence is unexplained (to us), but has left a hole in Landor’s heart.

Melling’s performance as Poe seems cut from a different movie than what Bale is working. Rabbity and given great swaths of dialogue to deliver, Melling’s portrayal takes Poe’s eccentricities as a given, rather than treating his short West Point stint as the origin story a character like this needs.

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 23, in some theaters; starts streaming January 6 on Netflix. Rated R for some violent content and bloody images. Running time: 128 minutes.