The Eternal Daughter: Tilda Swinton-Led Gothic Ghost Story Goes Deep

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A

There’s a feeling of a movie from a different era and the influence of Hitchcock in writer-director Joanna Hogg’s elegant new film, The Eternal Daughter.

The film, which continues Hogg’s collaboration with actor Tilda Swinton (The Souvenir, The Souvenir Part 2) is a gothic ghost story. On the surface it’s a simple quiet, serene film, but one that goes deep.

Swinton plays two roles: Julie, a filmmaker, and her mother Rosalind. Julie has brought her mother and their dog Louis to an old manor house-turned-hotel. Julie plans to spend her days developing her new film project, while her mother is going to have a quiet time, sorting through a bag of memorabilia, and writing Christmas cards. They’ll celebrate Rosalind’s birthday as well.

The hotel is out in the countryside on lovely, manicured grounds. In the evening, in the dark, the place is perpetually surrounded by fog. The locals believe the place is haunted and an old woman can be seen at night, gazing out of the windows on the main floor. Julie and Rosalind seem to be the only guests, and the Wi-Fi is unreliable, adding to the sense of isolation.

Things are slightly off from the beginning. For a long time in the film, the only other person they encounter in the hotel is a young woman (Carly-Sophia Davis), an impatient and seemingly disinterested front desk receptionist, who doubles as the restaurant server, and provides the film’s comic relief.

Even though the place seems empty, the room Julie booked isn’t available. At night, after the receptionist leaves, the old hotel feels deserted. It bangs and creaks. Sometimes there are distant sounds like voices whispering, or the faint traces of what might be a flute playing in the distance, giving Julie restless nights, and keeping her feeling off balance.

During the day, Julie finds a quiet place to work, a room with a desk in front of a window with a lovely view, but she can’t seem to get going on her new project. She wants to write a film based around her mother yet can’t work up to telling her mother what she’s up to. Plus, Rosalind doesn’t want to be the subject of a film.

As well, this isn’t just a random hotel. It was previously owned by Rosalind’s aunt, and Rosalind spent part of her childhood there. As Julie draws out her mother’s memories, she discovers that they were not all happy, and which causes both some distress.

The two women, mother and daughter, have similar temperaments, and have a comfortable relationship. Even when disagreements or frustrations swell up, there’s much love, tenderness, and respect between the two. They are close, and you can see the similarities in approach, in personality, of course enhanced by the fact that they’re both played by Swinton, but they are also mysterious to each other in many ways.

In terms of its setting and plot, The Eternal Daughter is quite spare. But what Hogg and Swinton patiently coax out of it is affecting.

Although it is a kind of ghost story, it’s more about the ghosts that live within our hearts and minds. Hogg is exploring a range of things here, from the personal — the mother and daughter connection — to the more universal. That manifests in the unconscious ways in which family ties and memories, and even small mementos affect us, how we experience and express that, and what becomes meaningful to us over time.

This is also about the creative life, storytelling, and filmmaking in general. The idea of what inspires us to tell our stories and, for a filmmaker, what the process of wanting to be true, to do work that is important to them, demands.

This is truly a collaboration between director and actor. A lot of the success of The Eternal Daughter rests on the shoulders of Swinton, and it is a tour-de-force performance, one of the year’s best. Her work is so subtle and precise that after a while you forget that mother and daughter are one actor. She’s created two full characters, connected and yet separate.

Swinton, as an actor, has a way of holding our attention, but never drawing attention to herself, or her technique. She’s incapable of melodrama or sentimentality. Her acting seems drawn from an innate sense of empathy and therefore feels deep and true. And that softness and empathy is the secret sauce in The Eternal Daughter.

Hogg isn’t in a rush to get us to any conclusion. Her approach is slow, patient, and quiet, and she weaves us into a story that creeps in like the fog that surrounds the hotel, and has a gentle, haunting effect.

And if I might, the tendency these days is to think of a small-scale movies as something that can be appreciated on a television screen at home. And yet something can be lost on the small screen. I’ve seen it both ways and would urge you to see this on the big screen, where the movie’s hypnotic mood and reflective emotional tone work best.

The Eternal Daughter. Written and directed by Joanna Hogg. Starring Tilda Swinton, Carly-Sophia Davis, and Joseph Mydell. Opens in theatres December 9.