‘I became insane,”Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1848 letter, “with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Which is not a bad description of director Scott Cooper ’s “The Pale Blue Eye,” adapted from the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard and set amid the macabre, rime-frosted Hudson Valley of 1830s New York—and the then-fledgling U.S. Military Academy at West Point. On the grounds, with a river view, a cadet has been found hanging and presumed to be a suicide. After the dead boy’s heart is cut out and stolen—a telltale sign that something more grisly is afoot—the cause of death is reassessed. Called in to help solve the crime—and, more importantly, derail a scandal—is Augustus Landor ( Christian Bale ), a much-respected former “constable” in New York City whose résumé, recited by the academy’s Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall) for no one’s benefit but ours, is illustrious: A retired detective instrumental in bringing down the Daybreak Boys, Shirt Tails and other gangs of New York, Landor developed methods of “bloodless interrogation” and solved the murder of a young woman at Elysian Fields, the now-long-defunct recreational area in Hoboken, N.J., that served as a playground for Manhattanites. The murder would later serve as the inspiration for one of Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt .” But where is Poe?

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