Review of the movie Eclipse with actor Jakub Štáfek

The list could go on: three characters brought together by a car accident to one place in the middle of the forest. A film oscillating between bizarre comedy and thriller. And a debut screenwriter who worked at a video store. The screenwriter’s name is Jakub Kovář, and Zatmění, which he produced and wrote, would like to be in the spirit of the works of Quentin Tarantino or other creators who like to mix genres, love narrative retrospectives and let the characters debate for a long time before violence breaks out. However, the work of the new production company Regner & Kovar Pictures takes only the worst of this 1990s aesthetic.

In the middle of the forest, a rumbling red SUV and an older but carefully maintained Mercedes model collide with a black off-road Land Rover. When the three drivers get out of their crumpled cars, they begin to investigate what happened. From the first moments, it doesn’t look like an ordinary accident. If only because none of the characters clearly desire to behave realistically.

Ján Jackuliak, in the role of the bearded Land Rover owner, stands manfully and silently, waiting to see what will happen. The man from the red rattle, performed by Jan Zadražil, plays an imaginary competition for the greatest Mirek Dušín and tries to teach others about grammar or the correct procedure for solving an accident. And Jakub Štáfek behaves like an impatient boy, paradoxically this style of his “like Lavi” – i.e. in the spirit of the hero of the series and the later film Vyšehrad – is ultimately the most believable.

It gradually becomes clear that the young man going by the name of Vladimír is not quite the owner of the wrecked Mercedes, and the guy playing Mirko Dušín is a drunken philosophy professor with a penchant for hooking up with female students. Only the taciturn bearded man, who seems to be enjoying the situation, remains a mystery. Unfortunately, the creators will solve this mystery for practically the entire 85 minutes, and the clearing in the middle of the trees will become hell not only for the participants, but especially for the viewers.

Director Petr Kubík has already proven that he has a certain feeling for modern genre storytelling. Three years ago, he filmed the fairy tale Princess Enchanted in Time, which, like its sequel last year, jumped between popular genres and rather remarkably drew “alien” elements from Disney movies and fantasy into the traditional Czech story.

Also in the current Eclipse, the director is trying to play a genre game. For example, the drunken philosopher, who apparently caused the accident, is torn between retrospectives and the present, his character seems to be in both time planes at the same time in some scenes – as suggested by the interplay of image and sound, in which the present and the past intertwine.

But this and other minor formal features cannot mask the ill-conceived scenario, which does not and does not decide whether it is a black comedy, an absurd theater or a thriller. At the same time, trying to combine it is not stimulating at all.

Eclipse clumsily works with flashbacks that seem to add new information to the puzzle. In fact, most of it was inferred by the viewer, or was quite explicitly stated. Each would-be new look at the events just before the crash only strengthens the tiresome feeling that we are stepping on the spot together with the heroes.

The only thing that keeps the film “afloat” at least a little is the feeling that something much harsher is coming than a verbal and fist fight in front of three wrecked cars. But a thriller and the fight for life that goes with it requires at least one essential thing: functional characters.

The three protagonists have nothing to root for or fear. The staff is played by a flutist who has more to do, but instead of studying, he moves on the edge of the law, which is schematic, but at least somehow believable. The professor – as is usual in domestic work when it comes to characters educated in the humanities – seems like a strange caricature. Of course, he has to sleep with female students, which is announced to the audience in one light-hearted scene introduced by dialogue along the lines of: “How many female students have you slept with?” – “And how many professors have you already slept with?”

At the same time, the situations do not serve to characterize the characters, let alone touch on ethical questions. They flimsily connect the relationships between the heroes purely for the purposes of the narrative.

Not even the finale under the light of a blood moon can redeem the film. In short, the creators turned the material for a short story into a feature film, which is just another example of how genre work is generally underestimated in the Czech Republic. As if comedies, thrillers and others do not deserve greater screenwriting and dramaturgical care, as if they can be sculpted mechanically, using well-known and well-worn formulas.

Eclipse does try for some kind of variation, but the result is that even tried and tested clichés don’t work, the narrative stagnates, humor and tension are almost absent.

At the same time, a short animated film mixing grotesque with violence is enough for a good genre play Happy End from 2015 showed Jan Saska. It had more ideas in six minutes than in the full-length Eclipse. In the end, all that will remain in the memory is the somberly mysterious, would-be terrifying look of the experienced hunter, who is lurking, even if he is just silently leaning against the wrecked car, and Štáfka’s occasional verbal outbursts in the style of the disheveled Lavi from Vyšehrad. Otherwise, unfortunately, it seems that the eclipse in the title primarily characterizes the screenwriter’s state of mind during the creation process.