The Eternal Daughter (Tilda Swinton, 2022)
Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is a gothic drama in which Tilda Swinton plays not one but two leading roles, as both mother and daughter.
The new movie by Joanna Hogg is about a middle-aged filmmaker who takes her aging mother on a research trip to an almost vacant hotel.
The British filmmaker has a habit of making semi-autobiographical movies, in which she mixes fiction with memories from her own life.
Hogg came to prominence in recent years with her two Souvenir movies, about a young filmmaker, trying to make it in the world of movies, while also dealing with a complicated relationship with her mother, played by Swinton.
In The Eternal Daughter, which can be seen as a coda to the earlier movies, daughter Julia is now an adult. She doesn’t have children herself, hence the title The Eternal Daughter, but instead has taken it upon herself to mother her own mother Rosalind. ‘She always makes such a fuss,’ Rosalind muses to no one in particular.
The trip to the strangely vacant hotel is loaded with memories, as mother Rosalind lived there herself as a child during the Second World War. For Julie, who wants to make a movie about her mother, it is perhaps the last chance to talk in depth about Rosalind’s childhood.
But even though Rosalind is happy to be back, she doesn’t really want to dwell on the past too much. And therein lies the rub: even though it’s clear that mother and daughter love each other very much, there will always be things we keep to ourselves, either because we can’t express them or because we are afraid of hurting the other person. So in essence The Eternal Daughter is about the unknowable parts of the people we love.
The movie is told like a ghost story, with the hotel making eerie sounds at night, that keep Julie awake. She complains to the only hotel clerk, who seems strangely unresponsive to her reasonable requests, although Julie does bond with the other staff member, a friendly elderly janitor.
The story takes place in the fall, and the fog obscures the trees in the forest near the hotel. The mood inside is quite mysterious too. It is the perfect setting for a gothic drama, that has quite a few surprises up its sleeve.
Swinton is in excellent form and owns the movie in her dual roles, giving lots of nuance to both mother and daughter. She also brought her own dog, Louis, to play in the movie. So in a way it’s a real family outing.
One word of warning: you could argue whether The Eternal Daughter is a proper genre movie. It uses a lot of genre tropes, but is also qualifies, and perhaps even more so, as a deeply felt arthouse drama.
I loved it and had a wonderful time watching the mystery unfold.
Note: The Eternal Daughter has been playing the festival circuit since last year. It is out now theatrically in Portugal and Spain. It is released in the Netherlands this week, with Turkey to follow in mid-July.