Glinting: An Unfiltered Glimpse into Grief
The fifteen-minute short film, Glinting, is a visual poem that explores grief.
As the movie begins, we hear the main character, played by screenwriter Eoin O’Sullivan, before we see him—on the phone with his mom, reassuring her that he is well and taking care of himself. Meanwhile, director Eddie Jackson shows the audience the truth: His home hasn’t been picked up, let alone cleaned, since his wife passed away. In the saturated light the sun brings into the kitchen, we can see the thick layer of dust that has accumulated on the kettle, the dishes piled beside the sink, and the shell of a hard-boiled egg sitting fragilely in its dish on the table.
After the main character hangs up with his mom, he listens to a voicemail left by a representative who requests, once again, that he come collect his wife’s ashes.
My mom passed away recently. I watched this movie the night before I drove to collect her ashes.
With this voicemail, O’Sullivan spotlights the central metaphor of the short film using the mid-afternoon sunlight pouring through the single-story windows: Not only is the main character leaving his home in the condition in which his wife left it, but he is also keeping her dust—her dead skin cells—in their home to preserve her essence, to feel close to her now that she’s gone. Picking up her ashes would make her death real, but letting the snow of her dust grace the grooves of his fingers? That is intimacy.
Glinting features three on-screen actors and one voice actor, but director Jackson had me wondering for just a moment what the film would have been like without seeing O’Sullivan, Bríd Ní Chumhaill, and Mo O’Connell at all. Perhaps a voiceover of the reassurances for Mom, juxtaposed with the voicemail about the ashes, might have played over the camera’s unblinking focus on the coated kitchen items, and that could have been enough to evoke the same emotion that caught in my throat in the first two minutes—but then, who would have disturbed the dust, and who would have appeared inside its pretend winter?
We need to see the main character’s hand turning this way and that in the sunlight, the dust collecting on his knuckles in a tender kiss, and we need to hear Karima Dillon EI-Tourney’s ethereal, playfully alien original score over the image, so we may enter that same haunting and hopeful space where the main character’s wife is both alive and not.
We do strange things when we grieve, and I know that firsthand now. By the time my mom’s service came around, I believed I had cried myself dry. That afternoon, my boyfriend and I took a ludicrously large bouquet of flowers home and displayed them on a shelf, and each day, a pedal or leaf fell to the ground, crispy, like my own personal fall.
One morning, I woke to find the shelf missing something, and I asked my boyfriend, “You threw away the flowers?”
And he said, “Yes, they were dying.”
It doesn’t make sense that the loss of this bouquet should ring me out in a way my mother’s memorial service did not. When we lose someone, we all ache, but what triggers the pain and the way we deal with it varies from person to person, from relationship to relationship.
Glinting captures that perfectly.