Eclipse: how a little-seen 1970s psychological thriller emerged from obscurity

Tom Conti has been in a heck of a lot of films. Greatest hits amid an eclectic back catalogue include Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Shirley Valentine (1989) and, more recently, Oppenheimer (2023). But back at the beginning of 2024, wearing my producer’s hat for BFI video publishing, I’d been interviewing the indefatigable Mr Conti about a less familiar credit: his starring role in Heavenly Pursuits (1986), a somewhat singular Scottish film, directed by Charles Gormley, in which he played an English teacher who might have the healer’s gift. His memories were included on the Blu-ray, alongside the main feature. 

While I was packing up, he asked me about Eclipse (1977) – another Scottish film, made earlier in his career, less well-known even than Heavenly Pursuits, and one of a handful he’d been in, he said, of which he didn’t have a copy. He understood, though, that there might be material in the BFI National Archive. Was there any way of digging it out, so that his family could see it?

Almost nobody had seen it for nearly half a century. Eclipse, written and directed by Simon Perry, adapted from a novel by Nicholas Wollaston, had been off the filmographic radar for ages. Briefly in cinemas circa 1977, it was, so the scant handful of contemporary reviews decided, a psychological thriller. According to the pressbook, though, it was “The story of the possession of one man – his mind, heart and soul – by his twin brother.” Shot on the Scottish coast, it told of a disastrous boat trip made by the pair to gaze upon the blacked-out moon, which ends in the death of one twin; and explores what happens to the other, Tom (Conti), after his return to break the news to his brother’s wife, Cleo (Gay Hamilton). 

Following the inquest, in a lonely house atop the cliffs, at a Christmas family get-together, Tom, Cleo and her young son Giles (Gavin Wallace) finally revisit the events of that dreadful night. But a sense of ominous foreboding overhangs the reunion; and is Tom an entirely reliable narrator?

It should have provided a terrific showcase for the acting of Conti and Hamilton. But few had the chance to appreciate it. Conti pondered the problem in a 1978 interview with critic Sheridan Morley: “The trouble with my film career is that the films succeed in directly reverse proportion to the size of my roles in them: The Duellists [1977] and Full Circle [1977] are doing very well at the moment, and I can be glimpsed briefly in them, but Eclipse and Galileo [1975] and one about a pop group, called Flame [Slade in Flame, 1975], hardly seem to get shown at all, and there’s quite a lot of me in those.”

Perhaps one specific reason Eclipse was hardly shown was that it was just so genre-defyingly peculiar, confounding the critics, and probably the punters, too. We’re barely out of the title sequence before we see a bloody body washed up on the beach. It looks like it was couriered across from the Hammer horror prop cupboard; but it’s a red herring. Anybody expecting a straightforward gouge-and-gash genre piece had patronised the wrong Odeon, for after that we’re whisked away into unpredictable, cerebral territory – isolated, miles from anywhere, with Tom, Cleo, Giles and dead brother Geoffrey, better known as Big G. 

It’s a fitting moniker for the overpowering, grandly moustached chap we see revealed in flashbacks. Gone but not gone, Big G looms over everybody, frozen, life-size, lest they forget, in an oil-painted portrait that dominates Cleo’s living room. The stage is set for an unusual festive season nobody will forget, and there’s always the turkey to chop up, but if you’re expecting grand guignol shocks, you’re out of luck.

The second and last film made for his own Celandine Productions, Eclipse was a cinematic gamble that didn’t come off for Perry, who’d mortgaged his house to make it. It came after the Perry-produced Knots (1975), directed by David I. Munro, which had been an audacious adaptation of an eccentric stage show, based around a book of linguistic-labyrinth poetry by then-trendy pop-psychiatrist R.D. Laing. 

Perhaps shaped somewhat in the spirit of its predecessor, Eclipse centred similarly around the games people play with language, to appear to be truthful, to be seen to be saying what they mean, while simultaneously entirely avoiding telling the truth and not saying what they mean, if you know what I mean. The eternal dilemma of how people communicate, or don’t, and the painful unlikelihood of entirely honest human interactions – even between lovers – are knotted at the chilly hearts of both films.  

Eclipse did not fare overly well with critics. Some commentators, weaving tangled webs of journalistic paradox of a kind even Laing may have appreciated, simultaneously attempted to applaud its originality, with one begrudging sentence, only to berate its unsatisfying nonconformity to genre specifics with the next. 

What strikes Yours Truly, a rather more impressed commentator now, though, is the slightly eerie way Eclipse seems to thematically, structurally and aesthetically foreshadow a marvellously strange and unusual film of more recent vintage: Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022). Curiously, both films feature key characters in colour-coded plastic coats; ritualistic revolutions around windswept coastal landmarks, startling cinematic tricks played with time and place amid uncertain, circuitous narratives; not to mention similarly spooky electronic soundtracks. In the case of Adrian Wagner’s music for Eclipse, this often evokes an unholy collision of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the chilling soundscapes of the Central Office of Information’s nuclear attack Protect and Survive shorts.

Perry gave up direction after Eclipse, becoming a journalist for Variety, later moving back into film production. Initial successes included Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and White Mischief (1987). Eventually, he’d become chief executive for British Screen, administering funding and invariably advocating the need for British filmmakers to make bold, risky, unusual films, distinctly different to those emanating from the USA.

Eclipse certainly adheres to his credo. And now that it’s finally available once more, watchers will discover a film that’s odd, uneven and, at points, unwieldy; but also – I think — unique and original. It’s not for everyone: it will doubtless divide opinion, once more. But there’s something strange and special about it. And that’s what the BFI Flipside Blu-ray collection – of which this is release number 51 – is all about. And, by way of a bonus, it means that, at last, Tom Conti can have a copy for his collection.

Eclipse is out on BFI Blu-ray from 21 April 2025.