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Spooky new Irish movie set for Big Apple debut

New McPherson movie shows how love can save your life

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Ciaran Hinds and Iben Hjejle in Conor McPherson's new play, "The Eclipse."

The world premiere of Irish playwright and director Conor McPherson's new film will take place at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, April 24.

Based on a short story by his friend and fellow Irish playwright Billy Roche, “The Eclipse” stars Aidan Quinn and Ciaran Hinds.

Although the plot of “The Eclipse” was conceived by Roche, the supernatural elements that give the new film its occasionally eerie atmosphere were introduced by McPherson.

Based in and around an Irish literary festival, the film follows Michael (Hinds), a widowed teacher who works as a volunteer at the festival. To his surprise he finds himself becoming increasingly obsessed with a woman writer participating in it. 

Says McPherson, “I introduced a supernatural element into ‘The Eclipse’ because that’s where I felt I would comfortably know where the heart of the film was. In a way it was a mixture of our two writing worlds colliding in a nice way. It’s been a total labor of love.” 

To offset sad sack Michael, Quinn plays Nicholas, a successful, full-of-himself American writer who comes to lord it over the Irish festival. Nicholas is the kind of fiction writer whose books are seen in huge airport displays. 

“All of his books are made into movies, you know?” says McPherson. “But he feels he’s a fake, he feels he’s a phony, and maybe he’s in a midlife crisis of some sort. He’s married, but he’s fallen in love with a writer called Lena (Iben Hjejle) who writes supernatural stories. He’s inveigled her to come to this festival because they’ve had a little fling in the past and he wants to reignite it.” 

Meanwhile, Michael has been seeing ghostly apparitions and is too scared to tell anyone about them. 

“He’s seeing things that are very frightening and he’s not sure if he’s going crazy, and he’s too afraid to talk to anyone about it. He’s a widow and he’s bringing up his two kids and he feels maybe he can talk to this writer Lena about it because she writes stories about ghosts. But Nicholas becomes very suspicious of him and the friendship that’s developing between Lena and Michael.” 

Says McPherson, “Quinn is playing the kind of role I’ve never see him do before. He’s really comic in it, but it’s always cringe worthy and believable. He’s a total contrast to Ciaran Hinds’ character who’s essentially a sort of broken figure who’s trying to restart his life. We really sort of root for him and we really want him to get out of this dreadful psychological mess that he’s in, that he can’t tell anyone about.” 

See more: irish theater, irish theatre, movies, irish movies, irish plays

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