The Eternal Daughter

Directed by Joanna Hogg

Running time: 1hr36 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Tilda Swinton stars in The Eternal Daughter

On the face of it, The Eternal Daughter seems a departure for director Joanna Hogg — the British filmmaker who has built a career predominantly on refined, reserved realism, crescendoing with the two parts of The Souvenir, her brilliant, autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young woman. Even if you know nothing about it going in, the silvery scarves of mist shrouding the opening shots may immediately lead you to expect a ghost story, or at least a story of some manner of haunting, set in a cavernous, rattling, largely unpeopled hotel that that looks, with its gothic spires and emptily manicured gardens, like the more stately sister institution to the Overlook in The Shining. Has Hogg, having just painted her own intimate reality across four hours of cinematic canvas, gone waywardly supernatural on us? 

Yes, and then no. My ears pricked up when two newly arrived guests, checking in at a most unwelcoming reception desk, give their names as Julie and Rosalinde Harte — the same names Hogg assigned in The Souvenir to, respectively, her film student alter ego and her well-to-do mother. Here, Julie is a middle-aged filmmaker adrift in a creative fog; Rosalind is her elderly mother, adrift in her own memories, which include childhood summers spent in this very building. They’re played, with typically dizzying commitment to the bit, by Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton, taking over one of these namesake roles from her own daughter Honor in The Souvenir. Perhaps this is, in fact, a present-day sequel, The Souvenir Part III, in the most surprising form it could have taken.

Either way, Hogg’s moody, shivery little curiosity is bigger on questions than it is on answers, and bigger still on wandering, unvoiced ruminations. Julie spends a lot of time in nervous, suspended thought, patrolling the eerily lit corridors of a hotel that, while fully booked — at least, according to its flinty, permanently bothered receptionist, wonderfully played by Carly-Sophia Davis — has the clammy, unoccupied ambience of something dreamed or half-remembered. Rosalind, meanwhile, stays in her room, connecting her rosy memories of the hotel’s past to its hollowed, unhappy present. 

When mother and daughter are together, their conversations proceed with the halting, disjointed rhythm of two lives half-lost to each other — and it’s in probing this out-of-time stillness and sadness that Hogg is in her sweet spot, their polite elusion and evasion of each other more unnerving than any of the film’s whimsical, occasionally stiff genre stylings. The Eternal Daughter is a cool breeze, a wraithy diversion, rather than a major statement of intent. Still, it turns out to be more Hogg’s tempo — a hushed, deliberate tempo at that — than it initially lets on.

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022) Written by Joanna Hogg | Shot by Ed Rutherford | Edited by Helle le Fevre

Screened in Competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival