Trailer for the movie "Blue Eyes" (Netflix)
In the second episode of the series "Wednesday", which recently appeared on Netflix, the heroine quotes Edgar Allan Poe: "Don't believe anything you hear and half of what you see."
Wednesday attends "Nevermore Academy", named after Poe's "The Raven" poem, a supposed famous alumnus of the fictional school.
Wednesday attributes the existential paranoia in Poe's writing to his time studying at the same institution: "What wonder he became crazy and drugged."
This is far from the series' last tribute to the influential author and poet, who became almost synonymous with gothic and morbid horror.
It turns out that even 174 years after his death at the age of only 40, Poe's work is still relevant, or specifically his historical figure as a brilliant man but also haunted and beaten by fate.
Another work that returns to his character arrived on Netflix today (Friday), less than two months after "Wednesday" - the movie "Blue Eyes", a detective thriller in which the young Edgar Allan Poe, in his own right, helps solve a murder mystery.
The events of the film supposedly take place long before Poe wrote the poems associated with him or the story "The Murders on Morgue Street", which over the years became a seminal and pioneering text of modern detective literature.
Why does the crow love a desk?
"Her blue eyes" (Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix)
The murdered, in this case, is a cadet at the West Point Military Academy in the state of New York in the early 19th century.
At first his commanders and friends think that it is suicide, but after his body is mutilated and his heart is stolen, the academy enlists the services of August Landor (Christian Bale), a police detective who brings with him to the task a magnificent reputation and a scarred soul following a recent family tragedy.
The poetic crime of stealing a heart in its entirety leads him to the young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), a cadet at the same academy who is far from being the king of the class.
The detective and the cadet become friends and open up to each other, while at the same time Edgar falls in love with a sickly young woman (Lucy Boynton) who does not shy away from his obsession with poetry, love and death.
Although Poe enlisted in the army as a youth and studied at the same academy, this is really not a biographical film - but rather an adaptation of a largely fictional novel, published about 20 years ago by Louis Bayard.
The book and the film do not pretend to tell the true story, but to salute Poe's work by inserting him himself into the literary genre he created - his detective and mystery stories became a kind of template that was later used by writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie (who herself received a similar tribute this year in the film "Look at them running").
Poe's detective, August Divan, was not a policeman or a private investigator but an ordinary person, even if extremely smart and someone who makes sure to notice even the smallest details.
He sets out to investigate mysterious murders out of curiosity, intellectual interest and a desire to discover the truth.
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Although the detective of "Blue Eyes" is called Augustus, it is Poe himself who gets involved in the murder investigation, not because of his work, but simply because he is interested in discovering the truth.
Later, he himself is marked as a possible suspect, because of his shaky relationship with the murdered man and with his classmates in general - but most of the time the mystery interests him like a riddle or a complicated puzzle.
However, the film does not present him as a cold and cynical person, but as an expressive, very emotional young man, eager to find his place in the world.
His diagnostic abilities are no less than those of other literary and cinematic detectives, but his emotional involvement in the investigation endangers not only finding the solution but also himself.
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Poo no poo no poo poo
"Her blue eyes" (Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix)
The important writer for the future receives here, therefore, a flattering description on the whole, written with a lot of respect and appreciation for his character, and without presenting him as a perfect and flawless hero.
The result is a fun character to watch, who surprisingly also adds humor and lightness to the wintery and macabre atmosphere of the film.
He is played by Harry Melling, who appeared in the "Harry Potter" films as the spoiled cousin Dudley, and also made an amazing guest appearance in the Coen Brothers' "Ballad of Buster Scruggs" a few years ago.
This film probably won't make him a household name, but his performance is successful enough to mark him as an actor with a promising future.
In the role of the detective, you will find Christian Bale in a not bad performance, but far from being one of the most impressive in his career - mainly because the character he received is not written well enough to arouse real interest.
Most of the time he's there to help jump-start livelier performances by other actors, like Melling, Timothy Spall or Gillian Anderson, in a completely bonkers performance of a flamboyant, tactless socialite.
Bale is not alone - there are many other actors in the cast who are wasted on dry, too similar or just plain boring characters.
Anyone who knows anything about the whereabouts of the charisma of Toby Jones is invited to contact the website system.
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"Her blue eyes" (Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix)
The film works much better when it combines the cold and menacing atmosphere Poo is so identified with with more human, tender or downright comical moments.
It is full of self-important officer characters with pompous period accents and aristocrats trying to pry into others' lives in a polite manner, so that it is enough to break the seriousness here and there to allow viewers to enjoy the mystery even when the goings-on are quite dark and disturbing.
This balance is broken in the last third and things start to slide from a touch of directed comedy to a comedy of the "what the hell is going on here" type bordering on camp, mainly because the solution to the mystery is at the same time completely silly and depicted with abysmal seriousness.
The feeling is that the director wanted to create something similar to "Prestige", with many dramatic twists, some mysticism and an alternative history grounded in reality - but for such a film you also need a really good script, not just Christian Bale in period clothing.
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Edgar Allan Poe
Christian Bale
Netflix
