Film review: The Eclipse

(Note: I'm so sick of my old template, I had to make a change. I'm not sure about this one but I'll try it for a while and see if it 'takes'.)

As a lover of thrillers and horror movies – not slasher movies, but the kind that dole out steady doses of heart-thumping suspense – I look forward to a good ghost story.

Every aficionado of thrillers or horror knows that at some point you’ll be plunged into a parallel world of fear or terror that there’s no escaping from until the end of the movie. A strong back story is vital to the believability of that world, but it must ultimately be secondary to the sometimes sadistic display of evil or supernatural forces, which must also have their own logic. Wolf Creek is one of the finest examples of a strong initial back story adding to the horror that awaits.

Yet watching a thriller or horror film is a bit like getting on a roller coaster. Once you’ve paid your money, you want to keep riding until the end. Occasional uphill chugs are a relief, but you don’t want to keep getting off for rest breaks.

The Eclipse promises a ghost story entwined with a love story. Ireland is an obvious setting for both, and the film is set in the storybook, rainy romanticism of the coastal town of Cobh in County Cork, amid the not-so-rarefied atmosphere of a provincial literary festival.

But the attempt to weave the two genres together doesn’t work, and detracts from both plot lines. In this film, the ghost story is the back story, and not only is it weak, but it lacks strong connections to the romantic plot. Unfortunately, this overshadows (eclipses?) what is good about the film.

The Eclipse has its antecedents in the brilliant Sixth Sense, and it also reminded me of the creepy Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia) with Mia Farrow, an underrated ghost/horror film made in the late 1970s that sadly isn’t available on DVD. While the elements of realism in these films are essential to their spookiness, The Eclipse can’t hold a candle (despite a surfeit of candles in the film’s imagery) to either of them.

*****Plot elements given below*****

Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) is a burly, laconic woodwork teacher, heavily burdened with a grief he can’t let himself feel following the recent death from cancer of his wife. He is a volunteer at the annual Cobh literary festival and himself a secret scribbler. He seems remote from his two children and his father-in-law, who lives in a nursing home.

Michael is assigned to pick up one of the festival guests, Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), a successful writer of books on the paranormal. Looking for all the world like a young Julie Walters, she is blonde, lithe, intense, and skittish about romantic involvement. Michael thinks he may have been seeing ghosts, and the two begin to develop a bond as they share their supernatural experiences.

Also at the festival is Nicholas (Aidan Quinn), a narcissistic best-selling author with a burgeoning alcohol problem. Being married doesn’t stop Nicholas from pursuing Lena, with whom he’s had a one-night stand in the past. The stage is set for a love triangle, with Lena at the apex.

*****Plot elements end*****

The mode to expect here is the British version of realism seen in, for example, Billy Elliot or The Crying Game. It’s not grunge, but it doesn’t have the excessive clean-ness of mainstream Hollywood movies. The colour palette is muted, the dulled light creating a sense of otherworldliness, of remoteness from the present. While it might abound in cliches, the camerawork succeeds in revealing the continuing presence of an older, more spiritual Ireland that exists as a substrate of the globalised present.

The acting is similarly low-key, character based rather than star-making. This enables some strong drama and lovely touches of finely honed Irish humour, even if the target is mainly the arrogance and vanity of Nicholas.

The presence of the ghosts signals another layer to life that we confront at powerful times, when experiencing grief for example. The aim of the film, I think, is to show how these two layers of experience, although separate, are entwined with each other – that encountering the ghostly layer can help guide us through the emotional mazes of everyday reality.

There are constant visual and verbal references to the past, the dead, and spookiness in general. Candles are lit by women dressed in period costume in preparation for a literary lunch; characters exchange words while shown in silhouette or are seen from the back as they stalk down tenebrous Irish corridors; Lena and Michael stroll companionably through a cliche-ridden graveyard on an inevitably overcast day.

These touches are inoffensive in themselves, but they promise a supernatural element that, while it pops up occasionally, never actually coalesces into a coherent narrative within the main one. There’s also one particular spooky manifestation towards the end of the movie that seems absurd, but again it doesn’t really go anywhere. And there are two attempts at schlock-horror, which, while they might provide short-term thrills, detract from the overall theme – an attempt to assert the validity of the supernatural as just another aspect of life.

Much more annoying, however, is that whenever things are getting a bit profound in the action of the film, or indeed when a particular, serious event occurs that Michael has been forewarned about, soulful choir music overwhelms the soundtrack. The effect is simply gauche; any genuine ambiance is ruined, because the viewer is being told that that they are now to lift their minds heavenward.

The two ghosts in the film don’t really have enough of their own narrative, and neither of them is connected strongly enough to the main narrative. There’s not even any obvious connection between the two hauntings, although in ‘real life’ the ghosts are related to each other. The traumatic event that occurs seems to be somehow peripheral to Michael’s life, its seeming main purpose to illustrate something about the supernatural. As a result, the culmination of the ghostly aspects of the film is something of an anti-climax.

The film handles its setting much better than its subplot. If it wants to create ambience while reminding us of how complex and unknown the world is, the town and landscape of the picturesque Cobh offer a convincing enough argument. Views of tall, brightly painted historic tenements seen from a ferry, and a stunningly luminous deep blue shore that Michael and Lena contemplate at dead of night, add a layer of authenticity to the film that some of the visual cliches can’t.

*****Plot elements given below*****

Having said all this, there is a scene towards the beginning of the movie which suggests how good it might have been. The household is asleep. Michael hears noises downstairs and goes to investigate. The dog wimps out with childish yelping. What Michael thinks he sees for a matter of seconds as he stands on the landing in the dim half-light is wispish-ly chilling in the way that blood-spattered corpses will never be.

*****Plot elements end*****

Ciarán Hinds is effective as Michael, even if you sense that he’s perhaps played too many similarly deep but inarticulate men in the past. A little bit ubiquitous in historical dramas, his turn as the repressed Captain Wentworth in the 1995 film Persuasion puts Colin Firth’s Darcy to shame.

Aiden Quinn has perfect comic timing as the champagne-soaked Nicholas. His presence is not only a foil for Michael’s character, but enables a gentle send-up of literary festivals and literary stars in general. While this send-up doesn’t go very far, Nicholas’s character continues to add much-needed drama and humour even as the ghost subplot fails to deliver. Iben Hjejle offers a poised, understated Lena, although we never know the source of her excessive reserve.

My criticisms about this film suggest the difficulty of bringing any work of fiction to the screen. Director Conor McPherson is also an internationally celebrated playwright, and he cowrote the screenplay with Billy Roche. The screenplay, in turn, is loosely based on a short story by Roche. I haven’t read the story, but I wonder if, rather than adding necessary extensions to the original plot, the screenwriters relied on inserting excessive ‘atmosphere’ to pad it out.

Having said all that, The Eclipse’s main story, while it’s fairly understated, does have its strengths; there's some powerful drama, and many of the interactions between the characters sparkle with sly Irish humour. Just don’t expect much more from the ghosts than a few unexpected jolts.