To the Moon review – beguiling essay on the satellite’s pervasive pull

Threading together sequences showing the lunar face of subjects from love to madness, this is a gorgeous journey into outer and inner space

It only takes eight minutes of To the Moon before we hear the ripples of Debussy's Clair de Lune, over a gorgeous vintage montage of embracing lovers. It's the equivalent of Pomp and Circumstance at the Proms for Tadhg O'Sullivan's beautifully succinct visual essay on the little guy in the sky; the moon's beguiling apartness exerting a constant pull on our emotional and imaginative lives, paradoxically making it an inseparable part of us. As the opening quotation, from a Jennifer Elise Foerster poem, puts it: Moon / Earth fragment / Remember us."

Appropriately, given the presiding deity here and its remit of the unconscious, O'Sullivan's film is an estuarial wash of lunar-related images, sound and text - all the better to percolate straight into us. Beginning with limpid shots of the rising and setting moon, its impressively broad set of purpose-shot and archive footage - including films from 25 countries, including ones by Satyajit Ray, FW Murnau and Carl Theodor Dreyer - confirms the moon's universal allure.