Christian Bale and Edgar Allan Poe investigate an old-timey murder in The Pale Blue Eye trailer

Okay, so Bale is technically teaming up with actor Harry Melling as Poe, even if the people cutting the trailer clearly thought Melling looked off-putting enough here for them to go ahead and add a special credit informing audiences that, yeah, he’s supposed to be Edgar Allen Poe. Who, in this case, is 21 years old and so pre-Raven, enrolled as a student at New York’s West Point Academy. But, wouldn’t you know it, occult murders come a knockin’, and so he ends up joining forces with Bale’s Detective Augustus Landor, whose penetrating stare gives the film its title.

Based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel of the same name, The Pale Blue Eye actually looks pretty fun (for a dour, moody definition of fun, at least). It’s always nice to see Bale lose himself in one of these grizzled, soft-spoken powerhouse types, and the basic historical fiction hook is certainly solid. We weren’t especially wild about Cooper’s last two movies, Antlers and the similarly Bale-starring Hostiles, but maybe this is a situation of mo’ Poe, fewer problems. We’ll know more when The Pale Blue Eye arrives in theaters on December 23, ahead of a Netflix release on January 6.