Simon Perry’s elusive, lugubrious, faintly bizarre psychodrama from 1977, based on a novel of the same name by author and travel writer Nicholas Wollaston is now re-released; it is a dreamily directionless movie which resists, or almost resists, categorisation. It seems as if it is going to be a thriller or supernatural mystery, and you can wait almost until the final credits for some final narrative flourish or definitive plot shock that would prove what it’s all been about. And in fact there is a revelation, but it is presented so coolly that you will be expecting something else to come afterwards. An unsympathetic producer might well want to cut this film by two-thirds and present it as an episode of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, but that would be to lose the flavour and perhaps the meaning. I’m still not sure what I think about Eclipse, but it’s certainly distinctive.
Tom Conti plays Tom, a thoughtful, gentle man whose sailing expedition off the Scottish coast with his twin brother Geoffrey (played by Conti with a Peter Wyngarde moustache) has ended in a tragic drowning. As he explains to the inquest, in the darkness caused by an eclipse, he lost control of the craft and his brother accidentally fell overboard, hitting his head which explains the corpse’s grisly wound. Some time later, Tom visits Geoffrey’s beautiful widow Cleo (played by Gay Hamilton, from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon), with whom he is clearly in love, and her young son Giles who adores his good-natured uncle.
And from there? The action drifts uneventfully onward, in what feels like real time. Cleo has a very peculiar full-frontal nude portrait of her late husband on the wall, but Tom claims that the man shown has his own, slighter, physique. Cleo’s drinking problem is revealed, and she is clearly suffering from depression. There is a sex scene which is skipped over and then partly revealed in flashback, as well as a horrifying moment from Tom’s past; finally there are some scenes of the fatal boat journey, with some discussion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To the very end, Tom’s relationships with Geoffrey and Cleo are not clearly depicted, but indirectly and rather bafflingly hinted at. It is an intriguing film, though perhaps the film’s residual enigma is stubbornly out of focus.
• Eclipse is on digital platforms and Blu-Ray from 21 April.
