Love Eternal

Synopsis: Ian Harding (Robert de Hoog) is a withdrawn, death-obsessed young man whose father died when he was nine years old. Traumatised by the event he shut himself in his room and stayed there for 10 years until his mother died and he was forced by circumstance to reconnect to the world at large.

To its credit-writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s Love Eternal based on Kei Oishi’s novel, 'In Love With the Dead' manages to make material which probably was better suited to the printed page although one still needs to be in the mood for its self-concious gloom,

I haven’t read ,Oishi’s novel about a seriously alienated young man who returns to the world at large thanks to his relationship with four women. The first one is a school mate who hangs herself in the woods behind Ian's house   The first seconnd Ian plucks from a mini-van in which she and a group of cultists have committed suicide. He takes her home, keeps her for a day or two then buries her in his front yard.  The third d is a woman (Amanda Ryan) that he meets on the internet who is looking for a suicide partner. This time he actually spends some time with her before she commits suicide. He takes her home, keeps her for a day or two, dresses her up and wheels her around in a wheelchair, then buries her in his front yard.  His fourth and most developed relationship is with a woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) whose young son has been killed in a car accident and wants to die.

What works in the film is the overarching sense of the indifference and injustice of life, which as the fractal-like visuals during the opening credits suggest is an endless process of replication and mutation with no purpose or meaning. What doesn’t work so well (aside from the question of why Dutch-born and accented de Hoog is playing an Irishman) is the way that Muldowney goes about unfolding the story.   

If the film’s first couple of episodes suggest a black comic version of Lars And The Real Girl, (2007) the third episode in which Ian meets a surprisingly attractive woman who wants to joint suicide feels rather forced. Who thought that having 'Walking On Sunshine' on the car radio as the pair prepare to commit suicide was a witty idea? Dennis Potter would be rolling in his grave. The combination of suicide and chirpiness just doesn’t work.  

A more general reservation is that whilst Ian appears to be being presented sympathetically as a typical-enough alienated Holden Caulfied-ish youth, on the strength of his behaviour in this and the previous episode there are good grounds for seeing him as decidedly disturbed. A good degree of forbearance is required to accept the rather dubious taste of it all. The fourth episode however, manages to achieve some credibility with the two leads generating a plausible rapport as damaged souls connecting across the vast distances of their loneliness.

Love Eternal is the sort of film that some people will see a lot in, others dismiss out-of-hand How much of its ambiguity is a one-to-one transposition from the novel, how much a result of Muldowney's adaptation is impossible to say but if you have a taste for the melancholic it should be wrtht looking into.

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