Jonathan Richards/IN THE DARK

THE ECLIPSE

Directed by Conor McPherson

R, 88 minutes

A GHOST OF A CHANCE

We're all haunted, let's face it. Whether it's a wisp of ectoplasm glimpsed on a staircase, or lost loved one who visits our dreams, whether it's a memory disturbed by a snatch of a melody heard on the radio, or a shadow moving in a curtain stirred by a late afternoon breeze, an unexplained scent of perfume or pipe tobacco or diesel fuel, or just a presence strongly felt, there are visitors who turn up from time to time in dimensions not strictly of the here and now.

        The Eclipse, a quietly elegant romance with a cool draft of the supernatural blowing through it, is the work of playwright Conor McPherson. Mr. McPherson's acclaimed theater output leans in an occult direction. The Seafarer (2006) deals with a Christmas Eve poker game with the devil. The Weir (1997) revolves around tales of Irish folklore.

        In this movie, a widower named Michael Farr (Ciaran Hinds) is raising his two children in the beautiful Irish seaside village of Cobh in County Cork, and dealing with the painful loss two years earlier of his beloved wife, Sarah (Hannah Lynch). Sarah's picture is on the kitchen counter, and her spirit is not far away, almost as manifest as before the cancer took her away. But there are other ghosts lurking about the place, in particular one that seems to belong to his father-in-law, Malachy (Jim Norton), who rattles around downstairs at night and then vanishes when Michael tries to approach him. The complication here is that the old man is still alive, a grumpy old inmate of a nearby nursing home.

        Michael is a high school woodworking teacher and lapsed writer who has volunteered in his spare time to be a driver for visiting authors at the Cobh Literary Festival. One of his passengers is Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), a British author of highbrow occult fare. Lecturing to the festival audience, with Michael listening from the back row, she explains that when you see a ghost, "your brain splits in two. One side of you is rejecting what you've just seen, while the other side is screaming that it's real." As they get to know each other better, Michael asks her whether she thinks it's possible to see a ghost of a living person. She nods slowly. "Maybe. If that person's close to death," she opines.

        More troublesome than any ghost is the very real, very obnoxious presence of Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn), a mega-successful Irish-American novelist who had a one-night stand with Lena at another stop on the festival circuit a year or so ago, and is determined to renew the liaison. Holden presumes a relationship that Lena is very anxious to bury, and he is ready to ditch his wife and take up with Lena full time. He's aggressively antagonistic to Michael.

        McPherson brews a strangely appealing composite, a movie that is mostly character-driven romance but that seasons the proceedings with timely scare-your-pants-off moments of horror. At first blush these may seem gratuitous, but they energize the atmosphere with unsettling jolts that jangle the nerves and grab the attention. This kind of thematic bastardy won't do for those who like their genres with untroubled bloodlines and hospital corners. But if you're willing to loosen your standards, The Eclipse offers some unusual and satisfying rewards. Of the many awards the film has garnered, McPherson has expressed his greatest delight in having received one from a horror movie festival

        Hinds, the sad-eyed Irish star of Persuasion, gives a performance that establishes the specific gravity of the movie, carrying the weight of his grief but not unwilling to let the light break through when called for. As his relationship with Lena deepens, you can see him physically begin to relinquish the burden of heartbreak. In building his character Hinds has said he drew on feelings of grief from the tragic loss of his close friend Liam Neeson's wife Natasha Richardson. As Lena, Danish actress Hjejle (High Fidelity, Defiance) is convincing as a British writer, and her low-key, real-world beauty makes a persuasive poultice to draw out the hurt of Michael's emotional wound. Aidan Quinn is brilliant, clearly relishing his role as the charming but boorish womanizing writer with an outsized sense of entitlement who believes that the world is his oyster and every month has an R in it.

        The other star of this picture is the town of Cobh, exquisitely captured by Ivan McCullough's camera in brooding hues and sweeping seaside vistas. Cobh does in fact play host to a number of annual festivals, including a Maritime Song Festival, a Deep Sea Angling Festival, and even a Blues Festival, and it was the last port of call for the Titanic, but it does not, apparently, have a Literary Festival. Yet. Maybe they'll come up with one now. The Eclipse, adapted by McPherson from actor/writer Billy Roche's Tales from Rainwater Pond (Roche has a cameo as the festival M.C.) has a horror of its own to contend with, the upcoming release of the latest in the blockbuster Twilight franchise, subtitled Eclipse. But McPherson knows how to deal with ghosts, and in its own quiet way his Eclipse should be able to stay the course.