The Ending Of The Pale Blue Eye Explained

Just in time for the gloomiest part of winter, Netflix's "The Pale Blue Eye" has arrived to explore the beginnings of detective fiction. Based on Louis Bayard's novel, the movie is a sort of origin story for the great American author and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Harry Melling (who you may recognize from "The Queen's Gambit") plays Poe during his brief tenure at West Point Military Academy, where he helps retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) solve the murder of a fellow cadet. Like much of Poe's work, the story involves visions of the dead, sickly pale women as muses, and even a tell-tale (missing) heart or two.

To be clear, Bayard's novel and the movie are both entirely fictional, but Melling's portrayal of the character is in the spirit of Poe's legacy, so "The Pale Blue Eye" is somewhere between "Lincoln" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" in terms of accuracy. Moody, gloomy, and chillier than the Hudson river in wintertime, it's a clever procedural that builds to a stunning and emotional twist. If you're left confused, as if a raven woke you from a nap by rapping on your chamber door, let's break down "The Pale Blue Eye" and get straight what we saw and what we dreamed. This is the ending of "The Pale Blue Eye," explained.

Landor is able to get away with murder in large part because of the actions of the Marquis family, perhaps the most Gothic American family not named Addams. Daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) suffers from a "falling disease" (epilepsy, in modern-day terms), and her father Dr. Marquis (Toby Jones) has exhausted all of 1830's modern medicine in attempting to treat it. Apparently, with the full blessing and participation of creepy brother Artemus (Harry Lawtey) and excitable mother Julia (a criminally underutilized Gillian Anderson), the family has turned to occult magic to treat Lea's symptoms.

As Landor and Poe learn in a book of arcane information about witches, that means that they coincidentally require "the heart of a hanged man." So the night Fry is killed, Artemus uses his uncle's old officer's coat to dismiss the cadet guarding the body and remove its heart, throwing everyone entirely off Landor's scent. Landor later uses this as cover, removing Ballinger's heart as well as the hearts of local livestock to play into the perception that there's a "madman" on the loose.

Not long after Ballinger attacks Poe in the woods for his interest in Lea, Ballinger is found hanged and mutilated the next morning. This casts suspicion on Poe for a minute, as he was understandably angry at Ballinger, but it's yet another red herring as it is of course Landor that killed the arrogant and aggressive cadet. What's entirely inexplicable is the fact that Ballinger didn't destroy Fry's diary, which implicated him in the attack on Mattie. By sending it to Fry's mother instead of just burning it, Ballinger accidentally marked himself for a brutal death.

We don't get to know Ballinger particularly well, so we don't know what motivates him to send the diary to Fry's mother, along with a note that implies she may well see fit to just burn it. There's no way, obviously, he could have known that she would instead innocently hand it over to the very man that killed her son, who would come after him next, but it's extremely unwise to leave it out there in general. In a broad sense, "The Pale Blue Eye" doesn't constitute an endorsement of West Point Academy — its cadets are mostly jocks and bullies that stumble blindly into their own deaths.

Though it stops short of the truly unsettling horror of modern scary movie classics like "Midsommar," "The Pale Blue Eye" maintains an unsettling aura of mystery by never quite revealing exactly what the Marquis family does with stolen hearts. It's just some sort of unspecified occult ritual that involves a "magic circle" and leaves a fair amount of blood behind on the floor. Dr. Marquis believes that his daughter is communing with the spirits of the dead — epilepsy has historically been associated with seeing visions and hearing voices, and many contemporary psychiatrists believe Joan of Arc suffered from it — but he doesn't think that his children are capable of murder.

Luckily for Landor, they graduate to attempted murder at a convenient point in time and are on the verge of cutting out Poe's still-beating heart for the ritual when he discovers them in the ice house. Even more conveniently, both Lea and Artemus die in the ensuing fire when a candle gets knocked over, assuming the blame for the two murders Landor committed in the process as they're no longer alive to defend themselves. It's not clear how much knowledge their mother Julia had of the previous ritual with Fry's heart (or if she can confirm that her children didn't murder Fry), although she was apparently willing to be an observer for Poe's death.

It's not always a bad thing to commune with the dead in movies. Perhaps you can party with the dead, like in "Beetlejuice," or maybe your dead mother writes poetry for you, like Edgar Allan Poe in "The Pale Blue Eye." But much less benevolently, we learn that Lea Marquis had an inspiration for her occult-heart-ritual cure through a new friend that she "met": her great-great-grandfather Henri Le Clerc (who is not, in fact, based on any real-life person). In another of the story's astounding coincidences, the very same "misunderstood" devil-worshipping cleric and witch hunter Le Clerc that Landor's friend had mentioned turns out to be a direct ancestor of the Marquis family.

In retrospect, it's almost comical that Landor missed the giant portrait of Henri Le Clerc in the Marquis's house just days after seeing it in his friend Jean-Pepe (the brilliant Robert Duvall). Although it's mildly misleading that Le Clerc is also known to be a witch hunter, having put some 700 witches to death in his time. The other witch hunter and demonologist that Jean-Pepe mentions, Pierre de Lancre, did in fact exist and preside over mass witch trials in 17th-century France, but was reviled and infamous for practicing the "witches' sabbath," the exact sort of occult ritual that inspired the Marquises. Like the real Edgar Allan Poe's work, "The Pale Blue Eye" is fascinated by the thin line between religious piety and communing with death itself, with an emphasis on the macabre French tradition.

After Poe's speech piecing the whole puzzle together, and Landor's weary confession, Poe asks "so what now?" Landor leaves the decision up to his new young friend, pointing out that he holds the only evidence that links him to the murders of Fry and Ballinger in the form of the notes that Landor left for Fry and Poe himself. Wordlessly, Poe burns the evidence and resolves to let Landor go free, causing the mourning and exhausted father to break into tears of anguished relief. As an orphan haunted by death himself, Poe perhaps knows that the acts of murder that Landor has committed will haunt him more than any kind of societal justice ever will.

It's a heavy, quietly devastating scene, as the act of mercy is overshadowed by the grim nature of what Landor has been through, as well as the sad fact of Poe departing his life for good. In another life, Landor speculates aloud, Mattie might have run into Poe the night of the ball instead of her assailants, and he'd have a happy daughter and future son-in-law instead of a life of death and sadness. Bale and Melling once again acquit themselves spectacularly well, weeping silent tears in turn as the melancholy becomes too much for them to bear.