THE ECLIPSE (Conor McPherson). 88 minutes. Opens Friday (April 9). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
The Eclipse is a tiny wisp of a film, almost insubstantial. It has three principal characters and maybe twice as many speaking parts, and though the whole thing takes place in an Irish village overrun by an authors’ festival, the tone is almost crushingly intimate.[rssbreak]
Which is entirely appropriate, because The Eclipse is the story of a haunted man.
His name is Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds), and he’s a widowed woodworking teacher in the little village of Cobh. He volunteers as a driver for the festival, just to have something to do. And he’s been hearing strange noises in the night.
In a conventional horror movie, we’d know what’s coming next: increasingly intense visions, a consultation with an authority on the occult, an attempt to confront the source of the haunting. To the credit of writer/director Conor McPherson, The Eclipse contains all of these elements without ever making them feel like requirements.
McPherson, better known as a playwright, shifts freely between genres, folding domestic drama and horror together with confidence to create a hybrid that’s completely convincing as both. If The Eclipse has an antecedent, it’s Kim Ji-woon’s Korean horror film A Tale Of Two Sisters, where mordant observations of a suffocating family were occasionally interrupted by the appearance of something horrible under the sink.
As the haunted, haggard Michael, Hinds – who memorably played Julius Caesar in HBO’s Rome – mutes his natural charisma, locking his long face into a miserable grimace. He’s matched in quiet intensity by Iben Hjejle as an author of ghost stories who’s drawn to him on more levels than she’d like to admit.
And then there’s Aidan Quinn, who nearly steals the picture as a prima donna author of empty bestsellers who’d very much like to turn a one-time thing with Hjejle into a regularly scheduled affair.
Quinn’s character has no impact on the master plot, but that’s sort of the point. He’s one more thing Michael has to deal with in the course of his very eventful week. That makes The Eclipse feel even more like a movie about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances – and that makes its slides into real horror all the more effective.
