The Eclipse - JAK

Full Disclosure: this review exists solely to make you watch this movie. Anything else you get from this (diversion, chuckles, etc.) is incidental. Kyle told me that I’ve failed if The Eclipse isn’t on your Netflix queue by review’s end. Firstly and secondly: this movie will not ‘change your life’ and it is, from what I know (but what do I know?), not groundbreaking cinema. It is, however, a good movie. And those are rare. It also encourages thought and discussion—rarer still.

Like Martin McDonough’s In Bruges, The Eclipse is the work of a young, talented Irish playwright, Conor McPherson. McPherson has earned a reputation for crafting top-notch stage dramas featuring the supernatural acting within everyday situations. Think Ghostbusters in drama form with a greater emphasis on the inner Slimers and Zules. But maybe that’s a stretch because while McPherson’s plays create a space for devils and ghosts, they are never about devils and ghosts. Rather they focus on the regular people who must confront literal manifestations of the same ghosts who haunt us all.

The everyman in The Eclipse is Michael Farr: good father, recent widower, former boxer, and present volunteer at the Cobh literary festival. Ciaran Hinds plays Farr as a kindly, vulnerable man who is set in opposition to the type of supernatural troubler that Hinds himself devilishly embodied in McPherson’s most successful stage production, The Seafarer. Farr’s first haunting comes in the form of a late-night sound from downstairs. Farr awakens to investigate and sees what appears to be the darkened form of his father-in-law move quickly, eerily, and downright scarily across the room. What makes the scene effective is its simplicity; without the special effects, it looks like an unsettlingly plausible kind of haunting. His father-in-law is neither in the house nor in the grave, but rather in a local nursing home—sad and embittered at the loss of his daughter and the perceived neglect by his son-in-law. His living ghost will visit Farr several more times in increasingly violent confrontations.

The following day the festival begins and Farr meets the visiting novelist that he’ll be chauffeuring around the city. The novelist, played with loveliness and depth by the Norwegian Iben Hjejle of High Fidelity fame, writes about the ghosts that haunt her own life. Farr turns to her for help and a mostly platonic romantic interest develops. Farr’s rival for her attention is another visiting novelist played by Aiden Quinn. Whiny, pretentious, insecure, and allergic to shellfish, Quinn’s Nicholas Holden provides some nice moments of levity. When he, for instance, challenges Farr to a boxing match, we get a breather from the earlier emotional intensity by witnessing the yippy Pekingese (http://tiny.cc/9j9ac) of an author get his comeuppance. If Farr’s relationship with Holden helps alleviate the building tension, then his role as a father ratchets that intensity up to the breaking point. The trauma of Farr’s ordeal shows most poignantly on his daughter’s face; which, frowning with a distress and heartbreak beyond her years, reaffirms that the film’s focus is on human loss, not supernatural warfare. After all, as Hjejle’s character tells us, it’s often us who keep the ghosts present; we can’t let them go.

So, don’t expect a young priest and an old priest for any exorcisms here. Instead of being typical horror movie props, the ubiquitous crosses and Mary statues instead suggest the hope of a much more subtle form of deliverance. Rather than a flashy, final confrontation, the exorcism of Farr’s ghosts requires a process as natural, and indescribably difficult, as grief itself.