‘The Crimes of the Academy’: The Youth of Edgar Allan Poe

To conclude the year, Netflix decides to return to the cinema with ‘The crimes of the academy’period thriller in which Scott Cooper, director of ‘Corazón rebelde’ and ‘Black Mass: Strictly Criminal’, adapts the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, with which the author explores the youth of the famous Edgar Allan Poe to become the writer remembered, renovator of the gothic novel and considered the inventor of the detective novel. A crime in the year 1830, when Poe was enlisted as a cadet at West Point.

However, Poe is not the protagonist of this gothic story; but Detective Augustus Landor, who must investigate a gruesome crime that took place at the West Point Military Academy, where a cadet was hanged, whose heart was later cut out. A premise with which Bayard has created a novel that he has been able to maintain tension and mystery until the end, imagining what Allan Poe’s year at West Point was like, since the following year he was discharged on charges of serious abandonment of service and disobedience to orders.

The starting point attracts attention, as well as that lonely detective who knows how to bring Christian Bale to life, who specializes in this type of rolewho forms an interesting tandem with the aspiring writer, who, enthusiastic as well as imaginative, decides to participate in the investigation, delving into a terrifying story with which Bayard has explored an underworld of cults and diabolical beliefs that could have inspired the famed master of terror.

Yes, the novel was captivating, but its translation on the big screen fails to cause the same effect. Furthermore, Cooper, who previously directed Bale in “The Law of the Strongest” and “Hostiles”, he collapses all that mystery shortly after starting his investigation and bringing Poe onto the scene in a much less organic way. The bond that Bayard created between the detective and the cadet writer also had some ambiguous affective overtones that are suppressed in this version, in which Poe seems rather a detective apprentice facing an expert who sins being too tormentedto the point that the tape leaves too many clues to the audience about a surprise final revelation.

A gothic story that lacks more mystery

Cooper creates story calling for more ‘dead out of the closet’, in the sense of leaving more evidence to the military establishment of the secrets it hides. Finally the mystery is resolved with a few statements, which do not reach the high institutions. Obviously, with such a result, what was expected would be to create another kind of atmosphere, more in keeping with the more modest ambitions to which he aspiresto avoid creating an expectation of disappointing resolution, which ends up happening.

Despite Bale’s commendable attempt to give his character more depth, he ends up being too tormented.to the point of being predictable. Something similar can be said of Harry Melling, who tries to convey that extravagant touch of Poe, in his incipient literary vocation, but who lacks minutes of relief and who stains himself with an inopportune naivety of an author who, in fact, boasted of sagacity. . Secondly, It should be noted that the film has a tremendously wasted luxury castas in the case of Timothy Spall, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Robert Duvall or Gillian Anderson, who would also have demanded more screen time.

“The Crimes of the Academy” deserved a better adaptation. His interpreters are sublime, just as his scenography manages to create that feeling of being faced with a gothic tale, in the purest style of the Allan Poe era. However, everything remains in the most aesthetic and visible part, since its plot is not up to Bayard’s book, since Cooper, who also signs the screenplay, transforms a hypnotic period thriller into a boring exercise in which the mystery loses its charm.

‘The Crimes of the Academy’ is available in theaters this December 23 and in Netflix from January 6th.

Note: 5

The best: Its costumes, set design, and its acting cast.

Worse: See how a mystery story trapped in fiction becomes a taciturn story.