1830 New York state. At West Point Military Academy on the banks of the Hudson River, tragedy strikes: one of the students is found hanging, and then another removes his heart from his body, which is hidden in the morgue. Worried army turned to August Landor (Christian Bale) – a nearby veteran and detective who lost his wife (died) and daughter (disappeared) several years ago, as a result of which he got drunk, but did not lose control. Edgar Allan Poe, a 21-year-old student (and an up-and-coming poet with two published collections), is crammed into the detective’s assistant. (Harry Melling).
Films in which Po appears as a character have been made for over a hundred years. The film adaptation of the author’s biography was shot at the beginning of the last century, and by the middle of the century, the author of the Crow could already be seen in such simple genre films as the Hollywood noir The Man in the Cloak or the Italian horror film. Movies The Castle of Blood and In a Spider’s Arms. A little over a decade ago, Ben Chaplin’s Poe starred in Ford Francis Coppola’s failed horror movie Between, then in The Crow (played by John Cusack) a killer who murders all of Baltimore from his works. called. Now – for a change – the author, who has taken the body of adult Dudley Dursley from the Harry Potter films, is, like Watson, being dragged behind the woefully brilliant detective, who will probably later write Auguste Dupin.
This regular temptation to introduce into a detective story a person considered to be the first detective story writer in the West is understandable in principle, and we wouldn’t blame Scott Cooper for succumbing to him, especially for the director, for infusing real people. The frame is also, in general, an ordinary story: his debut album Crazy Heart was conceived as a biography of country singer Merle Haggard, and his most famous work was Black Mass with Johnny Depp, based on the life of gangster Whitey Bulger. The All-Seeing Eye, as you might guess, doesn’t invent the bicycle here – except that it doesn’t pull the eerie veil of its literature in with Poe, as the raven did for Cusack. It’s not a reproach, but it’s worth keeping in mind, as they say: the tape never goes beyond the scope of a costumed detective thriller, and acts with restraint in everything up to the finale – from speed to atmosphere .
On the one hand, against this background, the local surname parade seems a bit extreme. With the horror movie Antlers, Cooper a few years ago convinced everyone of his ability to shudder where the plot didn’t shine, Bale has long been known for a wide dramatic range, and here, it seems, he’s not too jealous. Melling has survived years of Potter’s tail in The Coens and The Queen’s Move, where he’s a pretty hilarious buffoon, and the roles of Gillian Anderson and Charlotte Gainsbourg are so obscenely minor that one of them is at risk. from escaping. In a word, it is not entirely clear why all these people subscribe to something that is primitive in many ways and is unlikely to remain in anyone’s memory for long. On the other hand, the All-Seeing Eye perfectly fulfills its modest duties, and even if it does not jump over its head, it is still far from arousing the desire to chat with birds and shout “Never”. the beginning of the last credits.