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'The Pale Blue Eye' recruits Edgar Allan Poe & Christian Bale for a Netflix murder mystery in official trailer
The Pale Blue Eye arrives on Netflix Friday, Jan. 6.
NEVERMORE! Following his first foray into the world of horror with 2021's Antlers, writer-director Scott Cooper keeps the thrills coming in the official trailer for The Pale Blue Eye. Hitting Netflix early next month, the project finds Cooper reuniting with his Out of the Furnace star Christian Bale (Thor: Love and Thunder) for a 19th century murder mystery at West Point.
Bale takes on the role of Augustus Landor, a world-weary sleuth who is summoned to the prestigious military academy when a cadet turns up dead one morning. Frustrated by the school's code of silence, Landor recruits one of the soldiers-in-training — a young poet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe (played by Harry Potter alumnus, Harry Melling) — to help him solve the case, which seems to involve a fascination with the occult and a gruesome quest for immortality.
“Every character in the story has secrets,” Bale teased during an interview with Vanity Fair back in October. “And while Poe seems to be the one who is clearly putting on a performance, he is actually the most sincere. Everyone else is more quietly putting on a performance, but no one is who they are pretending to be.”
Check out the trailer below:
Based on this collection of footage, it looks like Cooper hasn't lost his knack for setting up a palpable atmosphere of dread and foreboding. In particular, the snowy backdrop recalls David Fincher's English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
"I thought, 'Okay, I have an opportunity to do three things with this film: Fashion a whodunit, a father and son love story, and then a Poe origin story,” Cooper explained to VF. “Poe at this young age was quite warm and witty and humorous and very Southernly. The experiences that I'm putting forth in this film led him down the darker paths that we have come to know him for."
The film's supporting cast includes: Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody), Gillian Anderson (The X-Files), Toby Jones (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), Harry Lawtey (The Letter for the King), Timothy Spall (Harry Potter), and Robert Duvall (The Godfather).
Based on the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye arrives on Netflix Friday, Jan. 6.
Need to satisfy your murder mystery craving right away? The Bone Collector is now streaming on Peacock.
