'Terms of Endearment' meets 'Night of the Living Dead' in 'Eclipse'

Conor McPherson's new movie brings tears and screams

“The Eclipse,” the new film based on a collaboration between Irish playwrights Billy Roche and Conor McPherson, had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival at the weekend. Word from the festival is that several major U.S. distribution companies were impressed, and the Irish made film will have a general release her later this year.

McPherson, 39, adapted the screenplay from a short story originally written by Roche, adding his own trademark supernatural elements and also directing the finished script.

Among the film’s strengths are its intimate sense of place (the film is set at a literary festival in Cobh, County Cork) and the camera work, which evokes the beauty of the Irish landscape frame after frame.

But there are other aspects of the film that, it has to be said, startled the premiere audience. It’s unusual for a film that explores how the shadow of grief can haunt a family to have a hissing black-eyed corpse turn up out of nowhere to attack the protagonist.

These unexpected and increasingly disturbing horror scenes had the audience jumping out of their seats, then giggling nervously, then wondering if that was the point.

McPherson’s previous ventures into filmmaking – a format he obviously loves – have not met with universal acclaim, and indeed the process of getting them made led him to wonder if they were ultimately worth the effort. Particularly when you contrast their cool reception with the plaudits he regularly wins on Broadway.

“Because of my previous experiences I was not sure if I would ever make another film, to be honest,” he recently told Irish America magazine. “So I took a long time to decide what one I wanted to do. I decided if I were ever going to it would be something I put my soul into and could absolutely stand over. That’s really where I am now with ‘The Eclipse.’”

“The Eclipse” was a labor of love for all involved, he says. With a paltry €2 million budget, which in film funding is less than nothing, and with its top flight Irish cast (including Ciaran Hinds, Jim Norton and Aidan Quinn) participating for very little, it still took McPherson and Roche five years to get from the first draft to the shooting stage.

“The reason it took so long was because first of all we were filming in Ireland, and that’s just not that interesting to the big money people in London and Hollywood. They want to know who’s starring in it and so if you’re not really part of that commercial world and you don’t want to be it can get tricky. But the great advantage for me, because we were completely under the radar, was that we had total freedom," McPherson said.

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Nster.com