A sinister detective movie starring Batman and Edgar Allan Poe on Netflix

Once the director and actor Kenneth Branagh said, when hiring Michael Keaton for his film A lot of noise and few nines: “I want people to understand that Batman and Shakespeare belong to the same world.” seeing the crimes of the academy (The Pale Blue Eye, 2022) one could imagine its director, Scott Cooper, that he might have thought “I want people to understand that Batman and Edgar Allan Poe belong to the same world”. The film, based on the best seller written by Louis Bayard, tells a detective story set in the year 1830. In it, an experienced detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is summoned to investigate a crime committed at the West Point Military Academy that could stain the prestigious name of this. In his task, Augustus will receive the help of a young cadet fond of writing named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).

Christian Bale is known for many roles, but his role as Batman has given him a name etched in the history of popular culture. As for Melling, he showed his unusual talent by participating in the Harry Potter saga, where he played the character of Dudley Dursley. Both actors have already shown that their most famous characters are not the only thing they have to offer. Here they are the center of everything, because the strongest thing about the film is the acting duel between the two. An important cast accompanies them: Gillian Anderson, Toby Jones, Robert Duvall, Timothy Spall and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

The author of the novel on which the film is based often combines elements of fiction with real life events. Edgar Allan Poe’s appearance at West Point in 1830 occurred in reality. Although we all know him as a literary author, Poe had a brief stint at said Academy. This fiction also plays with the idea that his relationship with Augustus Landor would lead him to become the creator of the detective genre in literature. This game between fiction and reality is quite charming and is the best of the film, released to start the 2023 season on Netflix.

For the rest, the story begins with great force and interest but gradually disperses, losing strength as the scenes go by. The narrative flirts with going in different directions and has a rather anticlimactic ending that leaves the film feeling like it has minutes to spare. All the time it seeks to portray a world that seems to be taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s texts, but ironically it is too long a story to be by the author.

the crimes of the academy is now available on Netflix.

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