what the film does
peter plunkett (o’toole) runs a crumbling irish castle as a failing bed and breakfast. facing foreclosure by an american businessman who wants to dismantle the castle and rebuild it in malibu as a theme park, plunkett invents a haunting scheme to attract american tourists. the problem: the castle turns out to have real ghosts, including mary (daryl hannah) and martin (liam neeson), who fall for two of the guests.
the film is a collision of tones. it wants to be a gothic romance, a broad farce, a ghost story, and a sex comedy, sometimes within the same scene. jennifer tilly plays the parapsychologist’s wife. peter gallagher is the parapsychologist. beverly d’angelo is the woman whose marriage brings her to the castle.
why this one
the film is a casualty of studio interference. jordan wrote and directed it as a darker, more melancholy piece about irish history and the weight of ancestry. the studio, tri-star, tested it poorly, reshot scenes, recut the third act, and released something closer to a screwball comedy. jordan disowned the released cut.
what survives is the cast. peter o’toole gives one of his great late-career performances, drinking and speechifying his way through every scene with the specific gravity of a man who knows the building is falling down and refuses to leave. liam neeson, early in his film career, plays a ghost with a brogue. the castle itself, shot at dromore castle in county limerick, is a character: crumbling stone, cobwebs, and the kind of irish rain that makes everything look like it is being slowly dissolved.
the letterboxd community has rediscovered the film as a cult item. the reviews split between people who see the mess and people who see what jordan was trying to build underneath it. both are right.
what stays with me
o’toole at the top of the staircase, drunk, delivering an operatic monologue to his mismatched staff about the dignity of their fraud. he is performing for a film that no longer exists, and he is doing it with complete commitment. that gap between the performance and the film around it is the whole experience of watching high spirits.
on hand
the dvd is the 2002 release in the canon.
image: letterboxd still; genuine film still from the climactic supernatural chaos. baked through scripts/bake_dark_photo.py at factor 0.45, 1200x675