EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE CASE OF THE HEARTLESS

The Pale Blue Eye (15A, 128 mins)

Verdict: Ponderous but classy ))))* THIS classy murder mystery, with a heavyweight cast led by Christian Bale, is an adaptation of an ingenious novel of the same name.

Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel imagined how the young Edgar Allan Poe, now considered the father of detective fiction and a master of the macabre, might have developed his later literary enthusiasms during his time as a cadet at West Point military academy.

The story is set in 1830. Bale plays Augustus Landor, a lugubrious detective hired by the

West Point commander (a lavishly sideburned Timothy Spall . . . one of the quirks of this production is all the Brits playing Americans) to investigate the murder of a cadet, found hanging from a tree and whose heart has been ripped out.

Landor soon enlists another of the cadets, Poe (Harry Melling), to help him investigate. Poe is a strange, cerebral young man, unpopular with his peers, although he and his penchant for poetry appeal to Lea (Lucy Boynton), the beautiful daughter of the West Point doctor (Toby Jones) and his wife (Gillian Anderson).

Then a second cadet is found dead in the same horrific circumstances, intensifying Landor’s suspicions that someone might be committing ritualistic murders as some form of satanic worship. He seeks confirmation from a whiskery old academic (played by 91year-old Robert Duvall, no less).

All this unfolds rather ponderously, but it is beautifully shot and cleverly written, and of course boasts that first-rate, mostly British cast (also including Simon McBurney and Charlotte Gainsbourg). The writer-director is Scott Cooper, who made another pair of films I admired, Black Mass (2015) and Hostiles (2017). The Pale Blue Eye, its title drawn from one of Poe’s short stories, further enhances his impressive list of credits. O THE Pale Blue Eye opens today in select cinemas. It will be on Netflix from January 6.