Despite early promise, Aidan Quinn never broke through to superstardom. But I'm glad he's still playing interesting roles, like the raging author Nicholas in the Irish supernatural drama The Eclipse. Nicholas is one part of a tense love triangle. The others are Lena (Iben Hjejle), who writes about ghosts, and the haunted widower Michael (Ciarán Hinds).
Directed and written by Conor McPherson, The Eclipse is set at a sad little book festival in the seaside town of Cobh. Michael works at the festival, where his duties include shuttling authors around. A single father, he is still mourning his wife's death from cancer. He also has a distraction: His father-in-law is supposed to be in a nursing home, but a horrific version of the old man, bloodied and leering, keeps showing up, causing car accidents, dragging Michael into the depths of hell via a handsome wooden wardrobe.
The Eclipse is an odd mix of the literary and the ghoulish. For the most part I liked it - especially when Nicholas and Michael get into an exciting fistfight.
But the melodramatic arc feels curiously unresolved to me, and not in an interesting way. And some of the horror sequences I found garishly amusing rather than scary. I don't think that was the desired effect.
