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Conor McPherson has proved he can bring the same quality of direction to the silver screen as he has for years to the theater.

The acclaimed Irish playwright premiered his film “The Eclipse” at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, where it was met this week with critical praise (Variety called it a film of “seductive grace”) and interest from distributors.

Much like McPherson’s plays (“The Weir,” “The Seafarer,” “Shining City”) “The Eclipse” bears an element of the supernatural.

The supernatural, he said, “is what I’m about.”

“The Eclipse” stars Ciaran Hinds, from TV series “Rome,” as a father, two years a widower, living in the Irish coastal city of Cobh. He’s a volunteer at the annual literary festival and is assigned to drive around a writer of ghost stories (Iben Hjejle). Aidan Quinn plays another author at the festival.

In many ways, the film is about grief. Hinds’ character repeatedly sees apparitions that terrify him — and perhaps make the audience jump, too.

“I do want it to be scary,” the 37-year-old, red-haired playwright said in a recent interview.

McPherson — whom The New York Times called “quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation” — has trafficked in similar territory before. His plays are filled with a sense of haunting and full-blooded — and often alcohol-induced — feeling.

“To me, there’s no difference between the supernatural and the natural,” McPherson said. “This is all a weird experience of being alive. We don’t know where anything came from or anything like that. It’s a strange privilege to be a little consciousness looking up at the sky going, ‘Um, what is this?’ To me, it’s all a huge mystery. It’s all the supernatural to me.”

“The Eclipse” is based on a story by playwright Billy Roche, but McPherson altered the main character to be a widower on his wife’s advice — a key change. McPherson describes the film (made for $3 million) as a kind of amalgam of Roche’s story and his play “Shining City” — which also focused on a ghost-seeing widower.

Though it’s not his first movie, McPherson considers it his first proper film — and it’s easy to see why.

Earlier in his career, McPherson directed the movies “Saltwater” (2000) and “The Actors” (2003). The latter was a comedy from an idea by the filmmaker Neil Jordan and received a number of bad reviews.

“I was like, ‘What have I done? This is terrible!’?” McPherson said of the reviews. “I didn’t ever want to be in that situation again. It just takes too much of your time.”

He said, “I knew that if I was ever going to do another one, that it would be something that I would totally understand, that was really coming from my heart.”

Ghosts and horror, of course, have a different tradition in movies than they do in the theater. McPherson is a huge fan of films like “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” in which the horror comes from within.

The playwright said he enjoyed stripping down his dialogue and doing more with subtle gestures that would never come across on the stage. (McPherson directs his own plays, too.)

“It’s about the type of dream you’re giving the audience,” he said. “In the theater, they have to dream it themselves. In cinema, they don’t have to do anything.”

Associated Press