Movie recap: The Pale Blue Eye

The story begins in 1830. Augustus Landor is a famous detective with a great reputation due to the many cases he has been able to solve so far. Captain Hitchcock arrives, who tells him that a corpse has appeared at the West Point military academy, and they need him to be the one to solve it with total discretion so as not to tarnish the good status of the academy. Landor accepts the assignment and goes to the place, where he learns that the dead young cadet responds to the name of Leroy Fry. The boy has been found hanged in the middle of the night and it is Dr. Daniel Marquis who tells Landor that the boy is missing his heart. In addition, Landor finds out something that the forensic examiner has missed. Fry has a severe blow to the head that leaves no room for doubt, someone has killed him and faked a suicide.

Landor goes to the exact spot where Fry was found and it is there that another cadet, the boy's partner, tells the detective that it was he who found the body hanging. Realizing that the killer is probably at the academy, Landor begins his investigation. Soon discovering that in Fry's hand is a piece of paper that appears to belong to a letter, he also discovers that the guard in charge of guarding the body the night before he arrived was relieved by someone who appeared to be pretending to be a captain. In addition, he receives a tip from another cadet who tells him that the killer might be a mysterious and not very talkative young man, one Edgar Allan Poe.

Landor meets the boy in a nearby tavern, soon discovering that he could be of great help in solving the crime. The two try to complete the letter, which he deduces may have been sent by a woman to meet furtively on the academy grounds.

During the first few days of the investigation, the academy's top brass informs Landor that a cow and a sheep with its heart ripped out have turned up. Also, the situation becomes more tense as they fear that the killer is back in action. It is when Landor finds in a hidden place a circle and a triangle drawn on the ground. This, together with the candles and blood make the detective deduce that behind the Cadet's death there may be a satanic ritual.

The detective consults his friend Jean Pepe, who as a professor with knowledge of rituals and occult practices, gives Landor clues to get closer to the murderer. However, while he is doing this, a second corpse appears at the academy. Cadet Ballinger is found without his heart, and Landor learns that he was Fry's friend. The detective observes, however, in this corpse that the slit to remove the heart is much less neat than in the previous body, deducing that the murderer is someone else and therefore someone more amateurish or that it is the same, but that this one was in a hurry to commit the aberration. Days after finding the second corpse, Cadet Stoddar, a friend of the two deceased boys, flees the academy for fear of being the third. Suspicions are then placed on Poe because the academy captains know that he had problems with both Fry and Ballinger. That's when the boy reveals to Landor that he had problems with them because they kept picking on him for being different from them. Landor continues to focus the investigation on trying to find out more about the common friends of the dead Cadets and also about anyone at the academy with a hidden interest in dark magic.

The investigation leads him to a young man named Artemus Marquis, who is also at the academy and is the son of Dr. Marquis, the doctor appointed by the place to do autopsies. Landor discovers that Artemus was friends with Fry and Ballinger and that they used to spend time at the Doctor's house. This is how he also learns that Marquis has a daughter named Lea, and that this was the trigger for Poe to fight with Ballinger, because both were interested in the girl.

Landor discovers that his assistant met Lea and since then they have been seeing each other and flirting until they develop feelings for each other. Knowing all this, the detective becomes suspicious of the family and begins to attend various meetings to which the doctor invites him. At one of them, Landor sneaks out and finds in the house the coat with which someone posed as a captain to change the security shift guarding Fry's corpse. This, coupled with Jean Pepe telling him that the Marquis family was descended from a notorious witch hunter and practitioner of dark magic, leaves Landor in no doubt that the killer or killers belong to the Marquis family. When he learns that Lea is suffering from unexplained seizures that the family links to spirits and possessions, Landor goes to the house where he found the Triangle and the candles, discovering that both the girl's mother and her brother are convinced that by ripping out hearts and using them in a dark magic ritual they can save Lea. The Marquis brothers are about to rip Poe's heart out. Landor fights with Artemus and manages to stop them, but causing a fire in the house that causes both brothers to die in the fire in front of their mother's eyes.

Landor informs the authorities that it was Artemus who killed the two cadets and also the animals by ripping out their hearts to use them in a black magic ritual. While Poe recovers in the hospital, the military academy thanks Landor for his service, thus ending his mission.

But the story doesn't end there. When Poe leaves the hospital he goes to Landor's cabin and confronts him, telling him that he knows that the disappearance of his daughter Matilda has something to do with everything that has happened at the academy. Poe says that thanks to comparing the note he left her one day when they began their working relationship, he found out that the handwriting on that letter and the handwriting on the piece they found in Fry's hand are exactly the same. The poet Poe deduces that it was Landor who truly killed the two cadets out of some kind of revenge towards them. Landor then explains that after settling in the valley with his wife and daughter, and after the sudden death of his wife he was left alone with the company of his daughter, telling him that she was abused by several cadets of the Academy and that Matilda days later, after not being able to bear what happened to her, threw herself off a cliff.

Landor, thanks to a locket that his daughter had managed to remove from the neck of one of her aggressors, got to Fry, who was the owner of the object, finding out thanks to the boy's personal diary that he committed the abuse of the girl with two other friends, Ballinger and Stoddar.The coincidence came when Landor found out that after killing Fry by hanging him and making it look like a suicide someone ripped out his heart. This gave him the opportunity to find out who had committed such an act so that he could blame him for the murder as well. It was Artemus who stole Fry's heart for the ritual upon learning of his death. Landor cut out Ballinger's heart so that everyone would continue to think that there is a murderer who kills to steal hearts. After telling him all this, Poe is disappointed that he trusted who is really a murderer. Asking him why he didn't charge the cadets and thus send them to prison. Landor explains to him that he did not want punishment for them but death for taking his daughter from him. That's when Poe burns the piece of letter Landor sent to Fry to bring him to his death, thus eliminating any evidence that might incriminate the detective.

The boy leaves disappointed in who he thought might have been his friend. Shortly thereafter, Landor approaches the spot where his daughter took her own life, tossing a ribbon of her into the air and approaching the cliff to throw himself off.

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© Emby Lat

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