Summary
Moonlit Connemara, 1898: a stone manor breathes peat smoke and unspoken grief. Kathleen, flame-haired and violin-raw, loves Kenneth—an American war-correspondent whose laughter cracks like distant rifle-fire. Her guardian, John Carteret, a widower stitched together by guilt, sees in her the living echo of Moonyean, Kathleen’s spectral aunt whose bridal veil still floats across the parlour every dusk. Through lace-curtained windows, the film watches memory become tyrant: John’s candlelit séances with a cracked portrait, his refusal to sign the marriage licence, the garden gate that clangs like a rifle when Kenneth steps through. Thunderclouds of civil-war flashback—Moonyean singing “Smilin’ Through” as bullets shatter stained glass—bleed into present-day shots of Kathleen’s torn engagement letter curling in the fire. The camera lingers on a child’s marble rolling into a blood-red puddle, on Kenneth’s trembling hand closing over a revolver, on John finally unsealing the attic trunk to release Moonyean’s wedding gown into the wind. In the climactic twilight, the veil drifts onto Kathleen’s hair; John, hallucinating reunion, collapses, allowing the lovers to walk toward a steamer that will carry them past the reef where Moonyean once drowned. Yet the final iris-in frames the empty rocking chair still swaying, as if memory itself refuses exile.
Synopsis
Kathleen, a young Irish woman, is in love with Kenneth Wayne but is prevented from marrying him by her guardian John Carteret. John is haunted by memories of his thwarted love for Kathleen's aunt, Moonyean.
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