Netflix has today debuted the official trailer for Scott Cooper‘s (Antlers, Black Mass, Hostiles) gothic horror thriller The Pale Blue Eye, based on Louis Bayard’s eponymous novel published in 2006.
Written and directed by Cooper and starring Christian Bale (Amsterdam, The Prestige, The Promise) and Harry Melling (“The Queen’s Gambit,” The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Old Guard), this ingenious tale of murder and revenge takes place at West Point Academy in 1830. In the early hours of a grey winter morning, a cadet is found dead. But after the body arrives at the morgue, tragedy soon becomes savagery when it’s discovered that the young man’s heart has been removed with surgical precision. Fearing irreparable damage to the fledgling military academy, its leaders turn to a local detective, Augustus Landor (Bale), to solve the murder. Stymied by the cadets’ code of silence, Landor enlists the help of one of their own to pursue the case, an eccentric cadet with a disdain for the rigours of the military and a penchant for poetry – a young man named Edgar Allan Poe (Melling).
Co-starring alongside Bale and Melling are Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Robert Duvall, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Hadley Robinson, Timothy Spall, Joey Brooks, Brennan Cook, Gideon Glick, Fred Hechinger, Matt Helm, Jack Irving, Steven Maier and Charlie Tahan.
This production marks Bale and Cooper’s third time working together, after Out of the Furnace and Hostiles.
The film is produced by Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, Tyler Thompson and John Lesher and Executive Produced by Tracey Landon, Dylan Weathered, Louis Bayard, Chris Sharp, Jennifer Lamb, Emily Salveson and Ryan Smith. Catherine Farrell and Chris Surgent serve as Co-Producers.
The Pale Blue Eye releases in select theaters on December 23, 2002 before streaming on Netflix on January 6, 2023. We’ll leave you with the aforementioned trailer which we’re sure you will agree is worthy of the old master himself.
