Adapted from a not very good novel, Night Train by Martin Amis.

This existential noir mystery would had been better in the capable hands of someone like David Lynch.

Patricia Clarkson plays hard boiled detective Mike Hoolihan. A man's name for a detective operating in a man's world of New Orleans.

Mike is investigating the death of Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) an astrophysicist shot in the head in the observatory she worked at.

Rockwell was the daughter of a decorated Vietnam war veteran and businessman, Tom Rockwell (James Caan.)

The suspects range from her colleagues, boyfriend, her father to a one time notorious serial killer. It could also just be suicide.

With all the mumbo jumbo of time and space, we see that Mike is losing her sense of self. The death of Jennifer has had a pronounced effect on her.

The film loses all coherent sense as it goes along and it just gets more uninteresting. A shame as somewhere there was a good film trying to break out if only it had a better livelier script.

Marin Amis's novel 'Night Train' is all about mood, a story told in an ultra-noirish prose about the moral and physcial exhaustion of a weary female detective. Its adaptation to cinema a 'Out of Blue' is less succesful, perhaps because film is an essentially moody medium anyway; the film replicates the book's atmosphere, but the style feels more familliar and less unsettling. As such, it feels like half of a more conventional thriller, in which the scenes providing tone would alternate between more action-oriented sections which here are missing; or like a deliberately low-key ending of a larger and longer story. It's not really a bad film; but the tale lacks the originality it had in its primary medium.

A metaphysical murder mystery directed by Britain's Carol Morley but set in New Orleans, moving at a funerial pace, taken in turn from a novel by Martin Amis and not only mystifying but art-house pretentious at times, "Out of Blue" really ought to be a total dog of a movie and yet its very weirdness and a couple of excellent performances, (Patricia Clarkson, Jacki Weaver),sustain it.

Clarkson is the detective investigating the murder of physicist Mamie Gummer, a murder that has all the hallmarks of those of a long dormant serial killer. Given that Clarkson proceeds in an almost catatonic state with suspects popping up out of the woodwork this isn't your typical thriller. Indeed it's hardly 'thrilling' at all but it's always interesting. James Caan is the dead girl's father, a superb Jacki Weaver is her mother and Toby Jones, a very nervy suspect. I haven't read Amis' original novel; perhaps it explains more than the film does but this is sure to divide audiences every which way.