Christian Bale, Harry Melling and Gillian Anderson on Edgar Allan Poe homage The Pale Blue Eye

Local detective Augustus Landor, played by Christian Bale, is enlisted to solve the murder, and in turn requests the help of a bizarre, eccentric cadet with an undeniable poetic flair – none other than Edgar Allan Poe.

It soon transpires that Poe, played by Harry Melling, is very much the right man for the job, as the murder mystery descends into a grisly, supernatural and Gothic tale.

Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye, based on the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, is in many ways a homage to Poe, who is considered to be the inventor of detective fiction and whose legacy remains a powerful cultural force, though the story in which he is involved is entirely fictional.

The writer is remembered as being a slightly unhinged, peculiar and macabre man, a heavy drinker whose own death in Baltimore in 1849 remains a mystery. In making The Pale Blue Eye, however, Cooper wanted “to capture Poe as a warm, witty, humorous but troubled young man” during his time as a West Point cadet. “What’s great about this opportunity is there’s so much to read, there’s so much research to be done,” says star Harry Melling, 33, who’s best known for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter series.

“Certainly for me, the big thing I wanted to do early on with Poe was to make sure that people enjoy him, enjoy watching him – find him a bit odd, yes, strange, but there should be eccentricities to him and ways of speaking and his notion of who thinks he is as this young, very talented poet. All of that stuff had to be fun.”

While in real life, no murders seem to have taken place in the brief seven months that Poe was at West Point, Cooper sought – like Bayard before him – to portray a fictional series of events that influenced Poe’s worldview and inspired his innovation in detective fiction.

Influential in the story, therefore, is Landor, Christian Bale’s “rather cynical” detective, haunted by his own past, who develops something of a father-son relationship with Poe while investigating the murder.

“That is how he has spent his entire life, thinking about morality and criminals,” says Bale, 48.

“As a law enforcement officer and detective, and a very successful one, he’s been around criminals his entire life. Now, he’s come to a point, though, where he has retired, in his mind, to a blissful existence in the country. But it isn’t going to be that way for him.

“He’s a rather cynical man who’s seen too much of the bad side of people to really believe in any goodness. And in meeting Poe, initially, he just views him as a farcical character, who has no grip on reality whatsoever, and as Harry was saying, is a complete performer.

“Whereas my character Landor is a detective, doesn’t like to think of himself as a performer at all, you know, he’s all about reality and facts and science and reward.

“But then it kind of turns into a sort of a father-son story, where Poe has a great impact and effect upon this hard boiled detective who didn’t realise that he was at the mercy of others as much as he actually turns out to be.”

Throughout the film, the rigidity of the military setting and the bleak world-weariness of characters like Landor are contrasted by the eccentricities of some of the other personalities in the narrative – such as the gregarious and at times hysterical Mrs Marquis, played by Gillian Anderson – many of whom are not always what they initially seem.

“It is fun to play such eccentric characters,” says the X-Files and Sex Education star, 54.

“I think one slightly feels like there’s a… especially working with someone like Scott, that there’s play to be had, and that you can push the boundaries and try different things, and that they’ll figure it out in the editing room.

“So to give a whole range of options of how mad she might potentially be, or how suspicious… How much does she know about what’s going on? How much is she holding back or feeling paranoid about being uncovered?”

The Pale Blue Eye is in selected cinemas, and from Friday streams on Netflix.