Love Eternal – Film Review by Frank L.

Director: Brendan Muldowney
Writers: Brendan Muldowney (screenplay), Kei Ôishi (novel)
Stars: Pollyanna McIntosh, Amanda Ryan, Emma Eliza Regan

Released – 4th July

Love Eternal is Brendan Muldowney’s second feature film. It is his adaptation of the Japanese novel by Kei Oishi entitled “In love with the dead”. That title recounts more accurately what is revealed in the film than the chosen title. Ian Harding (Robert de Hoog) is in thrall to death. He states in a quiet voice, with little if any emotion, at the beginning of the film that he should have been born a different species of creature such as a mountain cat but something went wrong and he was born a human. It is that something which haunts him. He does not fit with human society.

The film opens with the camera panning through an autumnal leafy forest; Ian is a six year old boy and his father is in a wheelchair. They are communicating by mobile phone, the phone goes silent and when Ian gets back to his father, his mobile phone is lying abandoned on the fresh soil having been dropped by the father. He is dead. Death becomes Ian’s close companion. He needs it and the immediate physical consequences of death, cadavers, close to him. It is where this strange young man connects to the world of human beings. The first sequence is the meeting with a young girl with whom he agrees to enter a suicide pact. They only partially succeed but he has a need to be close to death, to be death’s companion.

Muldowney employs a fine musical score together with many well-chosen images which ensures that death is in surroundings of some beauty. But Ian does live in a world that is juxtaposed radically to conventional life and it is not easy to relate to his obsessions.

Robert de Hoog gives a quietly determined, under-stated performance which by its own essence brings out the aloofness and strangeness of Ian’s personality. Polly Mackintosh (Naomi) insightfully states in a questioning tone “You are a very strange young man…aren’t you?” and it is this strangeness that Muldowney seeks to mine in this perturbing but engaging film.