There’s a chill breeze in the air… the moon is high and full… and in the distance, a raven squawks out a shrill sonata. “Watch the trailer for The Pale Blue Eye,” you think you hear it say. But, that’s ridiculous. Ravens don’t keep track of movie trailer release dates, right? Anyway, you can check out the trailer for Scott Cooper’s new mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye.

Based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel, The Pale Blue Eye follows a seasoned detective named Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), called in to hunt a deadly killer on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point. A cadet is dead, his heart cruelly ripped from his chest, and the school is desperate for answers. But when Landor’s investigation runs afoul of West Point’s code of silence, he becomes entangled with the fate of an insubordinate young cadet: a young poet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). Perhaps you’ve heard of him?

Scott Garfield/Netflix 

(L to R) Christian Bale as Augustus Landor and Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye.  

The “pale blue eye” of the film’s title comes from Poe’s classic short story The Tell-Tale Heart. There, the eye awakens a chilling impulse in the tale’s narrator: “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” 

The trailer gives us a glimpse at cadets scouring the woods of upstate (or, some would argue, downstate) New York, along with the grizzled features of Bale’s detective and Melling’s historically accurate pouf of hair. Will they find the killer? And what will be left of them if they do?

Scott Garfield/Netflix 

(L to R) Toby Jones as Dr. Marquis and Gillian Anderson as Julia in The Pale Blue Eye.  

In addition to Bale and Melling, The Pale Blue Eye stars a murderers’ row of talent, including Gillian Anderson (The Crown), Lucy Boynton (Sing Street), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Melancholia), Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Harry Lawtey (Benediction), Simon McBurney (The Manchurian Candidate), Timothy Spall (Spencer) and Robert Duvall (The Godfather). It’s written and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Antlers). 

And when can you see The Pale Blue Eye? Quoth the raven, “In select theaters in December and on Netflix Jan. 6.”