\u201cWait, what?\u201d I hear you cry, having reached the last two of those. Since when have simmering hate-fuck sexual tension and existential despair been constituent parts of the essential Yuletide experience? To which I reply: since we decided to spend Christmas with Tom, Cleo and Giles in the unjustly forgotten chiller Eclipse<\/em> (Simon Perry, 1977).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The set-up is simplicity itself: Tom (Tom Conti) and his widowed sister-in-law Cleo (Gay Hamilton) attend an inquest into the death of his brother\/her husband Geoffrey (also Conti) following a boating accident after the brothers inadvisedly took their vessel out during a lunar eclipse. Cleo\u2019s behaviour towards Tom is frosty, as is that of the Procurator Fiscal, who clearly has issues with Tom\u2019s testimony but in the absence of any other evidence begrudging records a verdict of death by misadventure. Despite the fraught atmosphere, Cleo asks Tom as they leave the court if he\u2019ll spend Christmas with them – the other party in \u201cthem\u201d being her precocious son Giles (Gavin Wallace). Tom accepts, evidently more out of duty than anything else, and Cleo commences the lonely journey back to her isolated home in Caithness in the Scottish highlands. Thus the first quarter of an hour of a 90-minute film; and thus a prevailing aesthetic – visually austere, directorially unshowy, almost documentary-like in its presentation of character, place and incident. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An immediate cut from the conclusion of Cleo\u2019s journey to the lights of Tom\u2019s Land Rover stabbing through the darkness of Christmas Eve as he jounces along the little-used road to chez Cleo shunts the viewer abruptly into the film\u2019s extended second act. And again, the set-up is uncomplicated: Tom rocks up with extravagant gifts for Cleo (a silk evening gown) and Giles (a train set and so many accessories that he probably emptied his local model shop), takes over chef duties for what is intended as a slap up Christmas dinner, discovers that Cleo has an Oliver Reed grade drink problem, incurs her wrath and Giles\u2019s delight when he insists on taking the boat out of Boxing Day, and finally comes to terms with what happened that fateful night of the eclipse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right up until the supernatural becomes explicit about eight minutes shy of the end credits, Eclipse<\/em>trades on nuance and suggestion in much the same way that The Turn of the Screw<\/em> and The Haunting of Hill House<\/em> wring terror from their protagonists\u2019 states of mind, hinting at the things lurking in the shadows rather than actually showing the ghost or monster. Slow burn to the point where you\u2019re not sure than anyone struck a match in the first place, Perry very veeeeery gradually allows a sense of \u201coff-ness\u201d to seep into his otherwise Ken-Loach-esque style. Occasionally, an elliptic bit of editing upends the documentary realism, as if Donald Cammell had got his hands on the footage. Adrian Wagner\u2019s sparse atonal score manages to be upsetting in ways I\u2019d need a degree in music theory to describe effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mainly, though, it\u2019s the wrongness of how the characters behave and interact that makes Eclipse so squirmily compelling. Giles doesn\u2019t seem that bothered by his father\u2019s death. Or that bothered about prancing around the bathroom naked (child nudity isn\u2019t unknown in art cinema – I\u2019m looking at you, Peter Greenaway – but it\u2019s an uncomfortable aesthetic choice and I\u2019d argue the hell out of anyone prepared to make a case for it). Or that bothered about his mother keeping a fifth of gin in the bathroom cabinet. Just as Cleo herself, a wannabe artist, isn\u2019t bothered about displaying in the living room she shares with her prepubescent son a life-sized canvas of her dead husband in the nude. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a film in which very little happens, it\u2019s impossible to tear your eyes from the screen. At least until it all becomes so intense that you need a break. I watched Eclipse<\/em> over three nights, half an hour or so per sitting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Christmas Day sequence, which occupies the lion\u2019s share of the running time, is one of the most excruciating expanses of cinematic space that I\u2019ve ever navigated. Two set pieces – one involving the Christmas turkey, the other Giles\u2019s train set – build to extremes of existential terror, the former chiming with David Lynch\u2019s Eraserhead<\/em> (released the same year), the latter something that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in Michael Haneke\u2019s filmography. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Without the sheer awfulness of Tom, Cleo and Giles\u2019s Christmas Day, the understated, reflective Boxing Day scene, which segues from revelation to coda within the space of the closing few minutes, arguably wouldn\u2019t work. As it is, the final scene tethers itself to the film entire on the wispiest of threads, a hair\u2019s-breadth cut to the concluding image only just sealing the deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eclipse<\/em> is a fascinating one-off. It\u2019s Simon Perry\u2019s only outing as either writer or director (his decades-long career in cinema was as producer) and yet his script is a perfectly honed exercise in nuance and all of his directorial choices are spot on. It\u2019s Gavin Wallace\u2019s only acting credit, never mind that his performance puts most child actors in the shade. And to the best of my knowledge, it\u2019s the only one of Nicholas Wollaston\u2019s books that has been adapted for the screen. It works variously as psychological horror, a study in possession, and a remarkably sanguine ghost story. It\u2019s not perfect – Conti\u2019s performance wobbles (Hamilton, however, is mesmerising) – but it generates a quiet sense of perversity that heightens so subtly you don\u2019t realise how powerful it is until it all but overwhelms you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lucy Bellingham<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What do you need for the perfect Christmas Day? Quick checklist: \u201cWait, what?\u201d I hear you cry, having reached the last two of those. Since when have simmering hate-fuck sexual tension and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,41],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-1378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","category-reviews","tag-december-2025"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/eclipse.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/tracks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/house.jpeg\")
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