The Pale Blue Eye: Christian Bale leads a starry cast in a beautifully shot, absurdly plotted movie

A veteran cop is brought back from retirement to investigate a strange case: it’s a set-up that has framed detective capers from Hercule Poirot’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to Sylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man. The deviation is in the historical details. Based on a 2006 novel by Louis Bayard, this fictionalised Gothic mystery, set at West Point, the US military academy, in the early 1830s, follows a New York detective named Leander McNelly (Christian Bale) as he investigates of a weird series of murders.

It’s not just that strapping young soldiers are being murdered; their hearts are being removed from their bodies. He is assisted – and occasionally outsmarted – by a bright young cadet named Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling).

Enola Holmes, another parallel (ish) fiction popularised by Netflix, is clearly the model.

In common with The Wonder, another prestige project for the streaming giant, The Pale Blue Eye is beautifully shot and absurdly plotted.

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Grimoires and rituals are already commonplace when Gillian Anderson, apparently playing Mrs Foghorn Leghorn, puts a deep-fried layer on the Southern Gothic. That’s no mean feat for a film set many miles from the Mason-Dixon Line.

Since Crazy Heart, his Oscar-nominated debut feature, Scott Cooper has proven himself to be an actors’ director, more specifically an A-lister’s director, having previously worked with Johnny Depp, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson, Jeff Bridges, Colin Farrell and, well, everyone. The Pale Blue Eye marks the film-maker’s third collaboration with Bale. Many other actors mill about to no real avail. It’s not a career high for any party, but it’ll serve well enough as silly Christmas entertainment.

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Henry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films and recently impressed in The Queen’s Gambit, is good as Poe the younger, bringing just the right ratio of keen intellect, literary expectations and creepiness to the role. Here’s a guy, you think, who might create compellingly dark worlds, marry his 13-year-old cousin and die in profoundly odd circumstances.

The Pale Blue Eye will be released in selected cinemas on Friday, December 23rd, and on Netflix on Friday, January 6th