The Eclipse

The Eclipse is a curious Irish ghost story that fiddles with the recipe just enough to produce interesting results. Working for a literary festival in his hometown of picturesque Cobh, middle-aged widower Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) begins a shy flirtation with a visiting author, Lena (Iben Hjejle), and winds up competing for her affections with bestseller brat Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn, whose enjoyment of playing such a lavishly awful American is infectious). Here are the makings of a poshly photographed grown-up romance, but just as you’re sufficiently becalmed by one of the recurring parentheses of choral music and solitary drift, a bloodied ghoul jumps out. Michael shows Lena the local sights, and they form figures-in-a-landscape compositions before the low whorled clouds, clean waterfront houses and the Cathedral that towers over Cobh, as inescapable as the inarticulate guilt that shadows Michael. The Eclipse is the simultaneous revelation of a place and a man, with their shared history, and it plays by virtue of Hinds, his face a hewn and weathered monument to regret.