Irish ghost story, slow, quiet, tasteful to a fault, easy to overrate for its avoidances. It deserves credit, even so, for regarding ghosts as a part of life instead of as part of a mere genre. The photos on the kitchen wall and in the bedroom efficiently fill in the background — the cancerous mother departed from a family of four — and the shadowy phantom that visits in the middle of the night earns an early shiver. Even the living are treated throughout to a lot of half-light and silhouettes, as if their place on earth is tenuous at best, their separation from the other side only slight. The dramatic situation, an unformed romantic triangle at the annual Cobh Literary Festival, is sufficiently interesting not to have needed the couple of cornier ghostly apparitions (blessedly brief) meant to remove you from your socks. And yet, something more, something else, seems to have been needed, something subtler, something frequenter. A drunken fistfight, just to preserve the Irish good name, brings the personal relations to a realistically messy climax, and tastefulness reasserts itself for a final ghostly apparition, a final shiver. With Ciarán Hinds, Iben Hjejle, and Aidan Quinn; directed by Conor McPherson. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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