Through a strange confluence of business and aesthetic judgments, Magnolia Pictures acquired both the best and worst films of last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. This is the week to accentuate the positive, because Conor McPherson’s haunting The Eclipse now returns to New York for its regular theatrical opening. (The worst, a dreary, polemic Indie misnamed Wonderful World, has mercifully already come and gone.) Despite its uncanny elements though, it would be a mistake to dismiss the film as a mere ghost story. It is an emotionally complex work that should serve as an example to Hollywood how to integrate the supernatural into an adult character-driven drama.
The village of Cobh in County Cork certainly looks like a picturesque seaport conducive to haunting. It also hosts an annual literary festival where widower Michael Farr volunteers, even though he has long forsaken his literary ambitions. At the current festival, he has been assigned to schlep two famous authors: the arrogant popular novelist Nicholas Holden and Lena Morelle, a sensitive writer of literary supernatural fiction. To Morelle’s eternal regret, she shared an ill-advised night of passion with the married Holden at previous conference and would now prefer to forget the entire matter. Unfortunately, he is not so inclined.
When not shuttling around his literary guests, Farr tends to his two children and visits Malachy McNeill, the dying father of his late wife. Late one night, Farr wakens to spy a figure that might be his father-in-law stalking through the house. Although he is still quite lucid and can be accounted for during the times in question, Farr continues to be haunted by something that resembles the irascible old man, in visitations of increasing intensity.
Eclipse delivers some legitimate chills, thanks to McPherson’s deft direction and the eerie sound effects, nicely creating the desired state of apprehension. However, on a deeper level, Eclipse is a meditation on how closely grief and love intertwine and reinforce each other.
Refreshingly, Farr is not like the petulant teenaged protagonists one finds in so many workaday Hollywood genre features. He is a mature adult who fulfills his responsibilities every day, despite still profoundly mourning his late wife. To use the loaded term, he has “family values.” Not merely likable, he is a sincerely sympathetic figure.
The winner of Tribeca’s 2009 best actor award, Ciarán Hinds gives a tour-de-force performance as Farr. Screaming in terror one minute and then playing a scene of quiet sensitivity the next, Hinds is called upon to just about everything in this film, but he never takes a false step. Dutch actress Iben Hjejle’s work as the warm but sophisticated Morelle is also quite richly nuanced. Only Aidan Quinn’s turn as Holden comes across a bit one-dimensional, seeming to exist just to create problems for other characters (of course, people like this unfortunately tend to pop up in real life).
Though McPherson is best known as a playwright, Eclipse (adapted from co-screenwriter Billy Roche’s short story) is extremely cinematic and not at all stagey. Eschewing the graphic violence and relentless false endings of cookie-cutter horror films that leave audiences feeling used and unsatisfied, Eclipse is a thoroughly engaging supernatural drama, featuring adults, made for movie lovers. It opens today (3/26) in New York (the original Angelika Film Center) and Los Angeles, expanding further in weeks to come.