Before there was Edgar Allan Poe’s genius detective C. Auguste Dupin, there was Detective Augustus Landor. Netflix has revealed the first poster for its gothic murder mystery The Pale Blue Eye, described by the streamer as “a gripping whodunit that’s also an Edgar Allan Poe origin story.” Starring The Dark Knight and Thor: Love and Thunder‘s Christian Bale as the veteran detective at the heart of the fictional mystery, The Pale Blue Eye re-teams Bale with his Out of the Furnace and Hostiles filmmaker Scott Cooper. See the poster below.
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The poster comes after Netflix dropped The Pale Blue Eye trailer, touting a cast that includes Harry Melling (Harry Potter), Gillian Anderson (The X-Files), Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody), and Robert Duvall (The Godfather).
Based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel, The Pale Blue Eye follows aseasoned detective named Augustus Landor (Bale), called in tohunt a deadly killer on the grounds of the United States MilitaryAcademy at West Point. A cadet is dead, his heart cruelly ripped fromhis chest, and the school is desperate for answers. But when Landor’sinvestigation runs afoul of West Point’s code of silence, he becomesentangled with the fate of an insubordinate young cadet: a young poetnamed Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).
The title is inspired by Poe’s classic short story The Tell-Tale Heart, where Poe writes: “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”
“Because my father taught English and there was lots of literaturestrewn about our house, Poe came into my world at a young age, and I wasjust fascinated with his works,” Cooper told Netflix’s Tudum. “And my father,after I directed Crazy Heart, he said, ‘There’s a novel that you should read; it’s The Pale Blue Eye and it has Edgar Allan Poe as a character at the center of an investigation.’”
The fictional murder mystery involving the literary icon “allowed me to do three things,” Cooper said: “Make a film that’s a whodunit; [tell]a father-and-son love story — a kinship between two men who are loners,who live on the margins of society; and then of course, this couldserve as a Poe origin story.”
The Pale Blue Eye is in select theaters December 23rd and streaming on Netflix January 6th.
