Love Eternal
Director: Brendan Muldowney
Talent: Robert de Hoog, Pollyanna McIntosh, Amanda Ryan, Emma Eliza Regan
Release Date: 4th July 2014
Brendan Muldowney’s second feature is an adaptation of Japanese novelist Kei Oishi’s In Love with the Dead, in which a morbid shut-in (Ian, played by Robert de Hoog) seeks out the company of suicidally depressed women, and becomes involved in their deaths. Some transpositioning is needed here: ritualised suicide and hikikomori (exponents of Japan’s ‘acute social withdrawal’ phenomenon) have cultural capital in Oishi’s native land that doesn’t export so readily to Muldowney’s placeless, pan-Irish, seaside setting, while the film’s grammar seems an uneasy blend of the laconic style of, say, Shane Carruth’s recent Upstream Colour,and the ominous, spiky sensibility of modern Japanese folk horrors like Ringu. What Muldowney himself brings to the table, most notably, is his recurring thematic interest in trauma, tackled with more thoughtfulness than in 2009’s sophomoric but promising Savage.
The result is an uneven but occasionally striking, powerful film: in one scene, Ian, pulled to the side of a woodland road, is interrupted in an attempt to kill himself by smoke inhalation when a people carrier pulls up nearby containing a group (a family, or cult perhaps?) attempting the same thing. We witness their preparations through Ian’s driver’s window, with a mixture of detachment and foreboding that evokes, for example, watching an act of violence unfold on CCTV. It combines two of the film’s most effective dimensions: innovative and unexpected use of the off screen, and evocative framing within the shot (graves, windscreens, etc. all get a look in). Screens are everywhere in Love Eternal, reflecting constellations of streetlights or acting as windows into Ian’s creepy suicide fora, and it’s no accident that a film so explicitly concerned with trauma might contain within its own form these spaces of microcosm, of projection and of exclusion, so reminiscent of the cinematic project itself. An interesting, unsettling story that testifies to its young director’s progression as a filmmaker.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
