The Pale Blue Eye film review — Christian Bale and Edgar Allan Poe meet in ripe malarkey

Anyone who thinks a film critic begins a movie in hope of a turkey misreads us. The sad truth is that bated breath is still typically involved. And if a masterpiece doesn’t turn up, well, maybe we’ll have fun at least. The latter is promised in spades by The Pale Blue Eye, a Netflix historical thriller stuffed with Gothic flourishes; a star in Christian Bale who is watchable even when careering wildly; and most juicily promising of all, a role as sleuth for a fictionalised Edgar Allan Poe.

Spoiler warning: The Pale Blue Eye is not much fun.

Neither does Bale play Poe, which may be part of the problem. Instead, he is veteran detective Augustus Landor, summoned to West Point military academy in the glacial winter of 1830. There he is greeted by an unnerved colonel (Timothy Spall) and a slab of exposition. He is, we learn, accomplished in code-breaking and bloodless interrogation. (This, like much else, has been taken from Louis Bayard’s 2003 source novel.) He also has a powerful thirst even before noon, a trait unimproved by the case he is asked to investigate. A cadet has taken their own life, but with a grisly complicating detail. Their heart has been removed. Call it a tell-tale.

The star should at least feel at home in a packed tea room of English character actors. Spall scowls; Toby Jones furrows; soon we have the gangling Harry Melling, once a young performer in the Harry Potter films, now introduced as E A Poe, fourth-year cadet. (Poe did actually attend West Point; Melling’s accent is harder to vouch for.)

The lyrical misfit is soon sidekick to Landor. Yet the on-screen hierarchy is muddy. Melling goes big as Bale tamps down. The genius detective is often all but a bystander. Like much else in writer-director Scott Cooper’s awkward film, it is hard to know if this is down to design or a difficult edit. Either way, Bale makes an odd second banana.

Next comes another body; a pale sweetheart; Gillian Anderson as a West Point grande dame. Mysteries abound. Among the owners of movie theatres, there will probably be confusion that the supposedly cinema-friendly Netflix gave them this to play over Christmas. (Meanwhile hit Knives Out sequel Glass Onion is now snugly streaming-only).

Maybe The Pale Blue Eye is meant to be a double bill: two ill-fitting movies sharing a title. One half gets ever more outlandish. There are ancestral secrets, whispers of devil worship, Anderson cranked eye-poppingly high. And yet Cooper the writer is clearly not trusted by Cooper the director, who shoots this ripe malarkey with a slow and earnest gaze, like a Hammer horror gone social realist.

Cooper and Bale previously worked together on 2013’s Out of the Furnace, a downbeat tale of Pennsylvania steel mills. Like their new collaboration, it wasn’t a terrible film. But it is a strange one to keep coming to mind as Melling flounces between scenes, quill quivering and vowels haywire, complaining of a grand ennui. Quoth the raven: you and me both.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from December 23 and on Netflix from January 6