Summary
A sun-dappled drawing room in upstate New York becomes the first domino: Daisy Rittenshaw’s idle arpeggio of laughter ricochets off the crystal, lands in Richard Desborough’s ear, and detonates a life-long credo of nihilistic hedonism. Desborough—lacquered in Princeton nostalgia, oozing Schopenhauer and absinthe—rechristens Daisy as his private religion, while his own wife Caroline and their infant son fade into charcoal sketches of neglect. The affair is conducted like a fever dream shot through a prism: clandestine letters slipped inside first-edition novels, midnight trysts in a greenhouse where orchids rot like bruised flesh, a single glove left deliberately where husband Jim will find it. Jim—stoic, self-made, still smelling of the copper mines he escaped—does not roar; he simply walks into Desborough’s mahogany study at dawn, places one gloved hand over the man’s mouth, and drives a paper-knife between ribs that once fenced a heart now bankrupt of empathy. Death should be the curtain, yet the film pivots into an oneiric penitentiary: Desborough’s top-hatted specter drifts through fogged lenses, tethered to the living by invisible catgut. He materializes to Caroline in a mirror that bleeds saltwater, to Daisy in a thunderclap that smells of burnt jasmine, even to his wolfhound whose mournful howl becomes Morse code for remorse. Each visitation rewires desire into restitution: Caroline rewrites her will to save the family estate, Daisy anonymously funds a scholarship for foundlings, Jim plants a grove of white oaks whose roots will one day cradle their grandchildren. Only when Flora—the overlooked chambermaid whose unspoken love for Jim supplied the murder weapon—confesses her complicity does the ectoplasmic Desborough shed the last shard of ego. Caroline, once the most wronged, now sees the boy she married beneath the scar tissue of arrogance; her whispered forgiveness unhooks the spirit from the world’s gravity, and he ascends in a spiral of silver nitrate reminiscent of a Melies rocket aimed not at the moon but at the idea that any act is ever beyond redemption.
Synopsis
Jim Rittenshaw is happily married to Daisy, or so he thinks. Richard Desborough, Jim's friend from his college days, becomes enamored of Daisy, who leads him on. Desborough lives by the creed "No God. No Sin. No future life." Desborough neglects his own wife and child. His wife Caroline goes to Rittenshaw and tells him what is going on. Rittenshaw then kills Desborough. However, before his spirit can be at rest, Desborough must make right the things he left wronged. He appears in visions to the various characters, even his dog, and one by one they are guided to perform acts that set conditions right. Eventually Flora confesses that she is the reason Desborough was murdered. When Desborough's wife recognizes him, she forgives him, and he is able to depart the earth.
Review Excerpt
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There are silents that whisper, and silents that scream—Earthbound does both at once, threading a needle of phosphorescent guilt through the frayed tapestry of post-WWI ennui. When the first intertitle flickers—“No God. No Sin. No future life.”—you feel the temperature of the room plummet, as though someone has flung open a mausoleum door in July.
Director Edfrid A. Bingham, working from Basil King’s scandalous bestseller, refuses the moral shorthand of Victorian melodrama. Adultery here is n..."
