Brendan Muldowney’s second film adapts the Japanese novel In Love With The Dead to the big screen for a film about a story that takes a rather strange and disturbing look at life, death, and what it all means in the grand scheme of things.
The eerie and slightly offbeat story sees quiet Dutch actor Robert de Hoog as the timid loner, Ian Harding, who’s a bit of a ghost walking around in the world. He doesn’t think he belongs, seeing himself as a “defective human being” as he struggles to understand how people function and how they connect with one another. He feels disconnected, out of place, and ultimately like he wants to die.
In the opening scene Ian’s father dies while Ian is still a child, later he finds a school girl (and possible classmate) hanging in the woods, leading Ian to becoming a recluse, keeping himself in his bedroom for years. He has a distant relationship with his mother and she too passes away when he’s still quite a young man. In her will she leaves him everything, including a book that details what he needs to do to be able to live his life – this ranges from bank details to lists of recipes. He lives his life on the internet, connecting with people who are suicidal – as is he. He decides it’s time to end his own life yet a strange turn of events sees another family beat him to it. In this moment, Ian becomes fascinated with one of the members of the ‘suicide group’ and it all soon turns sour, into something a little darker. Ian begins to be drawn to people who want to die, keeping their bodies once they’ve passed away as company, fantasizing conversations with them. It’s clear Ian has emotional scars left since his fathers passing, but can a real human connection help him finally embrace his own life?
I didn’t take to the beginning of Love Eternal, it felt like it was trying to go down a slightly happy and quirky route which was greatly out of tune with the tone of the film, but it soon found its footing in the second half as the human relationships began to be explored more. It seems like the obsession with death for Ian starts at 6 years old, witnessing the death of his father. Since that moment, nothing was the same for him, which only becomes worse when he discovers the body of a young girl who had hanged herself and then the death of his mother. Death seems to be following Ian around like a shadow, he becomes fascinated with it, and in particular why people want to die. He feels more connected with the dead rather than the living and he begins to keep corpses as company. He imagines he has the ability to have conversations with them and that they rely on him. He looks to them for the warmth and comfort, something he cannot seem to get through real human connections and something which can be attributed to with the early passing of his father followed by the near none relationship with his mother over the next few years.
This is a complex film that is uneasy to watch at times. Ian, while being gentle and harmless, is also unnerving but ultimately a sympathetic character. De Hoog does a fantastic job carrying a lot of the film while being the only man on screen and, what’s more impressive, is the lack of dialogue which is mostly unnoticeable as the film flows at a steady pace.
Rating: Love Eternal is a dark and fascinating look at life and death (6/10)
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