The Eternal Daughter (2022) is not a horror movie, but a ghost story. It’s useful to make that distinction since it’s about eeriness and suggestion, using ghosts as a way of dealing with memory, uncertainty and unresolvable emotions. Joanna Hogg (Unrelated) reunites with Tilda Swinton (after her first short film, Caprice, and The Souvenir Part 1 and 2) to play two roles, daughter and mother, who are on holiday in a hotel out in the Welsh countryside.
Within the staging and framing of the camera, as well as Swinton’s calibrated dual performances, it feels as if two characters are conversing in the same space, even if they never share it. The daughter, Julie Hart (Swinton) is a filmmaker trying to work on her next project (I didn’t clock that her name is carried over from the autobiographical character in Hogg’s The Souvenir movies). The mother, Rosalind (Swinton), grew up in the hotel as a transplant during World War II and spends her time organising Christmas cards and eventually reminiscing about painful memories. Then there’s Louise the dog who needs walks, which often take place at night on the hotel grounds.
With the dramatic orchestral music and the 16mm cinematography by Ed Rutherford, The Eternal Daughter works in the tradition of classic ghost stories, framing Swinton like Deborah Kerr in The Innocents. Though it really deals with more relatable anxieties and fears, wandering a hotel feeling like you’re the only one there, or hearing something (a voice? a scream?) within a howling wind. Eventually the film steps into the metatextual and presumably autobiographical, a consideration of love and agony within a mother and daughter relationship, and how to depict that creatively.
Atmospheric in its look and sound, The Eternal Daughter nicely develops from its initial table-setting into something emotionally and thematically resonant. Even if I don’t have the same relationship as depicted between mother and daughter, it keys into the muddling of parent and child roles when people get older, and the importance of trying to hold onto things even as they are impermanent, like breath fogging up a window pane and fading away.
Available on iTunes/Apple. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 