Film & Television

John Maguire: Occult Poe murder mystery loses heart and pace as the grim story unfolds

Scott Cooper reimagines real-life historical figure Edgar Allan Poe as an unofficial recruit to help solve gruesome killings at a military academy in this Gothic detective thriller

Christian Bale in The Pale Blue Eye: the film captures the austere atmosphere, but struggles to ratchet up the tension. Picture: Netflix

It’s a bold move, inserting the real-life originator of the Gothic detective mystery into your own one. Louis Bayard’s fiendishly clever 2006 novel The Pale Blue Eye, however, avoided any suggestion of twee pretentiousness by being a devoutly unsentimental story of torment and terror into which a young Edgar Allan Poe fitted like a key filling a lock. In Scott Cooper’s even more fully realised adaptation, set in the snow-blasted woods of upstate New York ...