Tribeca Film Festival: THE ECLIPSE Review

Playwright/writer/director Conor McPherson does not do subtle very well. Whether it’s a play like The Seafarer, where the devil plays poker with a man for the right to his soul or a film like The Actors (2003), where a struggling actor pretends to be a gangster to make his craft more lively, there’s really little room for greys in his black-and-white worlds. He utilizes that painfully straightforward style to maximum effect in The Eclipse (2009), a romantic drama and ghost story that finesses his typically contrived plot structure and usual thematic preoccupation—if given a choice, will a man choose to stay put or let go of his past/obligations—by making a story of grief and comfort stylishly blunt.

As in The Seafarer, McPherson’s moral Atlas in The Eclipse confronts the specter of his mundane obligations through supernatural events that are oddly naturalized by stress and grief. Widower Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) meets horror author Lena Morelle (Iben Jhejle) while volunteering at the Cobh Literary Festival. The two form a tentative relationship but connecting with one another is difficult thanks to the return of Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn), famous author and Lena’s ex. Matters become even more complicated when the ghost of Michael’s father begins to haunt him, though he has yet to pass on.

Michael is constructed as an instantly relatable figure and a very effective one at that. There are few responsibilities the man does not have, making his cluelessness regarding Lena’s dalliance with Nicholas all the more sympathetic. His daily routine during the festival consists of sternly doting on his kids, gophering for the festival, becoming entranced by Lena, having to put up with Nicholas’ prima donna schtick—which Quinn excels at thanks to how willing he is to become almost Mel Gibson-level sleazy—try to forget about his dead wife and oh yeah, get attacked by a (literally) bloody ghost. With all the balls he’s got up in the air, Michael’s most spectacular feat is not having already gone postal all over the picture-esque hills of Cobh by now.

That would never happen seeing as how Michael has a saint-like reserve of self-restraint on tap. The one fantasy of Lena he allows himself is so inhibited that it makes Eric Rohmer’s sex scenes look pornographic. In it, he sees Lena go into the bedroom that she’s told him she’s too afraid to sleep in—the Irish moors are apparently too scary for a horror authoress—enters after her and then closes the door. All this happens while he’s driving from her bungalow back to his kids’ with a cigarette on his lips and a screaming corpse in his passenger seat. Yes, Michael’s stigmatic ghost screams because if he didn’t, Michael probably never would.

The scenes with Michael’s ghost are the best example of why the film, despite its obviousness—once Michael cagely tells Nicholas he can box early on in the film, it’s just a matter of time before we see him land a few good haymakers and win his girl/right to happiness—is genuinely engrossing and emotionally satisfying. They steadily ratchet up the tension from quiet moments with dark figures in corridors filmed with straight-jacket restraint to a scene of a screaming corpse popping up out of an armoire that makes the mistake of trying to drag a man of Hinds’ size down with him. Thanks to McPherson’s expert pacing and winning sense of visual composition, even the gaudiest of the film’s scare scenes earn their yelps and in turn, the predictable but no less gratifying happy ending.