With its strong cast and sense of atmosphere, it’s not till it’s over that you realise what a disappointment In The Electric Mist actually is. Based on a bestselling book by James Lee Burke, it stars Tommy Lee Jones as David Robicheaux, a veteran cop investigating the murders of a series of pretty young women and trying to tie them to the killing of a black man that he witnessed as a child – a man whose body is coincidentally discovered early on in the investigation. Robicheaux is also haunted by visions of a Confederate officer, and director Bertrand Tavernier has shoehorned in some references to Hurricane Katrina, so we get the point that history hangs heavy; the problem is that the old case turns out not to have enough of a causal link to the new murders to justify making such a big fuss about it.

It is this inability to make the main elements hang together that destroys the film: characters are introduced only to disappear inexplicably, ideas are planted and then swiftly forgotten. And after all these seemingly inadvertent red herrings have been disposed of, all that’s left at the film’s centre is a formulaic police procedural with an underwhelming solution. Even what the film does succeed in – the evocation of drunken, eerie, hallucinatory swamplands – is smashed in its dying moments by an ill-judged volte-face as it plumps for a supernatural explanation.

The set of In The Electric Mist was reportedly a troubled one, with serious differences in vision between director and studio, and as a result the film went straight to DVD in the States. It could be that all its dead ends and confusions are explained by the fact that this version, at 98 minutes, is nearly 20 minutes shorter than the director’s edit that premiered at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival. It’s certainly hard to believe that this is the film Tavernier planned at the outset.