Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

There are so many familiar faces in The Pale Blue Eye, it gets genuinely distracting. There are four Harry Potter series cast alumni, although to be fair Toby Jones was merely the voice of the house elf Dobby in those films; his actual face is familiar from countless other films. The same goes for Simon McBurney, to a lesser degree: he voiced Kreacher in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. The genuinely jarring faces are two who were much larger characters in the Harry Potter universe but are much older and thinner now: Timothy Spall as Superintendent Thayer; and Harry Melling as Cadet Edgar Allen Poe—yes, the Edgar Allan Poe, played by the young man who once played the far heavier Dudley Dursley.

As it happens, Melling is inspired casting. This guy grew into a gaunt, almost crater-eyed young man, perfect for the aesthetic of a 19th-century poet with a taste for the truly morbid. He works well for ambiguity as well: Poe has a flair for the eccentric and dark, but it is well established early on that he is not the villain.

Who is the villain proves to be complex, arguably even convoluted, in The Pale Blue Eye, which is wrtier-director Scott Cooper’s version of a murder mystery. Cooper is the man who previously brought us such varied titles as Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass and Hostiles, and this body of work evidently granted him a blank check from Netflix: this new film was granted limited release just prior to Christmas, and has otherwise been streaming exclusively on Netflix since January 6.

I rather wish I could have seen it in a theater. The Pale Blue Eye is the kind of movie that moves at a glacial pace but rewards patience, and strikes a compellingly melancholy tone that would far more successfully draw viewers entirely into its world from inside a cinema. As for whether it’s worth watching at home, at best that depends on your interest in the film’s genre, and particularly, its aesthetic.

To be honest, this movie isn’t quite dark enough. It establishes an eerie vibe, but never manages to be unsettling, or even particularly spooky. I dug it when Poe asked a woman out on a date to a cemetery, where she proceeds to have a seizure. More of this please! But really, even with its element of Satan worship—which itself is really quite sanitized—this film is really nothing more than a conventional murder mystery, grafted onto a 19th-century American setting.

That’s not to say I still didn’t find it worth watching, mind you. Christian Bale returns to work with Scott Cooper for the third time—that’s half of his feature films, to date—as the detective summoned to investigate grisly murders involving the removal of corpse’s hearts. He makes a rather unlikely but oddly workable pairing with Melling as Poe, as they team up to suss out clues together.

Charlotte Gainsbourg is underused in a supporting part as a passing love interest of Bale’s. Robert Duvall appears in two scenes as a crusty old academic. And Gillian Anderson is both virtually unrecognizable and iconic as Toby Jones’s tightly wound wife—the wife of the local doctor. The glacial pace picks up about halfway through the run time, which for me at least made it worth the wait. And then, about three quarters of the way through the story, there is a sequence climactic enough to feel like a solid ending to the film. Anyone not already familiar with the runtime would no doubt be surprised to find another half an hour left to go, in which we are treated to the final twist, turning everything we saw on its head.

It’s fun enough, I suppose. Not as thrilling in surprise as I might have liked. But, to its credit, The Pale Blue Eye offered a world I enjoyed inhabiting for a couple of hours.

*We’re not on Privet Drive anymore: Christian Bale and Harry Melling have an unlikely meeting of the minds two hundred years in the past.*

Overall: B