Netflix has released the trailer for ‘Crimes of the Academy’ (The Pale Blue Eye, 2022) directed by Scott Cooper, who surprised last year with ‘Antlers’ and starring Christian Bale opposite Harry Melling as a young Edgar Allan Poe. The film arrives in select theaters in the US on December 23, 2022, and will begin streaming on the platform on January 6, 2023.”
The West Point Murders
The film, written and directed by Cooper, is based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel of the same name, a gothic thriller that has been in search of funding for more than a decade. centers on a young cadet the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe (Melling) and a series of murders that would have taken place at the United States Military Academy, West Point, in 1830. Bale plays retired detective Augustus Landor, tasked with investigating them.
In the official synopsis:
“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 turns wild when it is discovered that the young man’s heart has been removed. Fearing irreparable damage to the fledgling military academy, its leaders turn to a local detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to solve the murder.”
Hindered by the cadet’s code of silence, Landor enlists the help of one of his 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 interesting thing about this project is that Edgar Allan Poe is a central character in the story, and even more so with the face of Harry Melling, better known for playing Dudley Dursley in the ‘Harry Potter’ film franchise. But the cast is not far behind, nothing less than with Robert Duvall, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawte, and Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall, Hadley Robinson, Joey Brooks, Brennan Cook, Gideon Glick, Fred Hechinger, Matt Helm, Steven Maier, and Charlie Tahan.