Despite being the least successful of Almereyda’s films, The Eternal is actually his best. Again Almereyda revises a well-used them – in this case the mummy story – but does fascinating things with it. The mummy genre is one that seems to exude as much in the way of dusty creakiness as its main character. There is almost nothing of the originality that had been conducted with the mummy film for decades. But then 1998-9 suddenly offered a number of major revampings with the big-budget, effects-driven likes of Talos the Mummy/Tale of the Mummy (1998) and The Mummy (1999). 95% of all mummy films circle around the cliche images of Ancient Egypt, while there are a handful of Mexican films that feature Aztec mummies.

Almereyda’s considerable novelty is in transplanting the character to come up with what at face value seems the quite incompatible image of a mummy film located in Ireland. The initial concept seems bizarrely incongruous but as soon as Almereyda starts to throw up ideas about Druidic witches buried in peat bogs the idea develops remarkable plausibility. Almereyda quickly disposes of any idea of shuffling, bandage-enwrapped creatures and develops a remarkably haunting story at the center of which lies, as in Nadja, an ethereally mysterious yet deadly woman. Almereyda creates a great deal of atmosphere, slowly drifting through the large old haunted mansion, developing an increasingly spooky tone with images of the mummy transforming into a doppelganger of Alison Elliott and a series of hypnotically dreamy scenes of it seducing and killing its way through the household. The film becomes particularly good during its latter third with the images of the doppelganger as a creature that cannot be killed, continuing on despite gunshot wounds and electrocution. The Eternal alone of Almereyda’s works so far pegs him as an enormously promising director. This critic waits in anticipation for his next offering.