The Pale Blue Eye Review

Masanobu Takayanagi shoots the Hudson Valley in winter as a place drained of colour, all bare branches and grey light on grey stone, and for an hour the atmosphere does the work a plot has not yet had to. Harry Melling is the find here, playing Poe as an affected, lonely, genuinely intelligent boy rather than a wink at the writer he becomes, and his scenes with Bale carry a real and unexpected tenderness. Bale plays Landor at one low register throughout, which suits the character and gives the film nowhere to build.

The mystery is the weakness. Clues arrive by confession rather than deduction, the occult subplot is introduced and dropped, and Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones are handed characters who exist to be suspicious and then to be irrelevant. Then the ending doubles back to reframe everything through a withheld piece of information, which is not a twist so much as an admission that the investigation we watched was beside the point. Gorgeous to look at and hollow once it stops.