Release Date: December 23, 2022 (Select Theaters), January 6, 2023 (Netflix)
The film, written and directed by Cooper, is based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel of the same name—a Gothic thriller that he’s been looking to make for more than a decade. It centers on a young cadet the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe (Melling) and a series of murders that took place at the United States Military Academy, West Point, in 1830.
West Point, 1830. In the early hours of a gray winter morning, a cadet is found dead. But after the body arrives at the morgue, tragedy becomes savagery when it’s discovered that the young man’s heart has been skillfully removed. Fearing irreparable damage to the fledgling military academy, its leaders turn to a local detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to solve the murder. Stymied by the cadets’ code of silence, Landor enlists the help of one of their own to pursue the case, an eccentric cadet with a disdain for the rigors of the military and a penchant for poetry—a young man named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).