The Eclipse

In The Eclipse everyone, at first, seems to walk around talking in low tones. It’s a nice way to establish a mood of quiet desperation, of a time and a place where no one really seems to be in a hurry to get on with life.

The action takes place during a literary festival in a beautiful Irish town, the sort of hamlet, it seems where strangers take the time to stop and give detailed directions. Director, the famed Irish playwright Conor McPherson, spends a lot of his energy on establishing an atmosphere akin to a sort of lazy Sunday afternoon, the kind where the Northern light is bruising and low and the temperature is moderate, the kind just right for sinking into a good book (or a whiskey).

At first all this mood making seems to be in the service of an interesting, but rather sad eyed character study of a recently widowed woodwork teacher, Michael (Ciaran Hinds) a one time aspiring writer with a couple of kids and no dreams left. That is until the first ghost appears, and Michael is scared witless, his dignified veneer cracks. Then McPherson releases all kinds of cinematic Hell – the soundtrack splits under the weight of a zillion decibels, and there are not-quite subliminal flashes of tortured faces. As a technique it’s startling and immediate; like Michael we’re not quite sure what’s ‘real’ or imagined and the suspense of the movie is all about waiting for the next apparition to arrive so we can decide.

Of course what The Eclipse is really about, isn’t ghosts real or imagined, it's guilt and grief. Michael gets the chance to ‘let go’ in the way movies know best; by falling in love via a brief encounter. Lena (Iben Hjejle) is a bestseller author who has no problem at all believing in ghosts or things that go bump in the night, which, given the circumstances offers Michael a great deal of comfort. Her big problem isn’t paranormal, but very human, but does involve a haunting of sorts. She once had an affair with Aidan Quinn’s buffoonish novelist, Holden, another guest at the festival and he won’t leave her alone. In the best tradition of romance (and airport novels), confusion, mixed messages and a showdown between the blokes, only partially resolves the erotic possibilities.

Surprisingly, The Eclipse is neither as much fun or as silly as perhaps it sounds here. Based on a short story by Billy Roche, it basically a hang-dog middle-aged love story but McPherson directs it like he’s doing Pinter – the bland comings and goings of life are freighted with much meaning, but what’s missing is a felt sense of existential dread. Hinds, a fine actor, comes off as a gloomy fellow, a bad risk for the fetching Lena.

Apparently it was McPherson’s idea to make manifest the supernatural elements (they weren’t at all a part of the original). As a piece of cinema the horror scenes are striking, but since the rest of the movie is performed and shot in a bland and beautiful TV style it hardly matters. If anything The Eclipse is a bit like a BBC talk-fest inserted with very brief and very violent off-cuts of the sort of horror seen in recent Asian cinema.