Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Beautiful but unfinished
A jarring unevenness of tone mars this extraordinarily good-looking Irish film, the sensation of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, about a man coming to terms with the loss of his wife.
Lurching between domestic melodrama, fright flick (complete with a keyboard version of Bernard Herrman's
screeching Psycho strings) and love story, with a brief detour into knockabout farce, it leaves the viewer feeling tantalised rather than satisfied.
In part, that's because its co-writers, director McPherson and Billy Roche (the latter's short story provided the germ of the screenplay), are never really sure where they're going - much less how to get back. The ghost story is more creaking hinges than creeping horrors and the love story lacks any trace of chemistry. Their theatrical background shows through in some pretty laboured screenwriting, too: there's too much clunky expository dialogue and despite the valiant efforts of Hinds and Quinn, its characters too seldom sound like real people.
The craggy-faced and likeable Hinds plays Michael Farr, a small-town woodwork teacher who is managing to sustain his role as widower single father of two despite being - quite literally - haunted by grief.
Filling a volunteer slot at the town's annual literary festival, he is appointed minder and driver for visiting writer Lena Morelle (the irritatingly pretty Hjejle). She's carrying baggage - an old liaison with Nicholas Holden (Quinn), a smug and arrogant peacock who is the conference's star attraction - but tellingly for Farr, she's something of an expert on grieving and ghosts.
What develops is more than slightly predictable and the rather pat conclusion draws on capital that the film hasn't really saved up. The many pleasures are mostly peripheral - a splendid if sometimes overwrought Nymanesque score by Fionnuala Ni Chiosain; strikingly beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography; an attractive setting (the seaport town of Cobh in County Cork); a gentle pace - but the film never feels fully formed.
LOWDOWN
Cast: Ciaran Hinds, Iben Hjejle, Aidan Quinn
Director: Conor McPherson
Running time: 88 mins
Rating: M (violence, offensive language)
-TimeOut
