"The Eternal Daughter" - Film Review
Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is a gothic horror film about the fraught relationship between mother and daughter. It’s a relationship that has been examined time and again, but Hogg creates a new twist on this dynamic by having Tilda Swinton play both the mother and the daughter. As the daughter, Julie, Swinton is herself, but as Rosalind, the mother, she has a gray wig, paler skin, wrinkles.
The Eternal Daughter’s setting is an old Victorian home that has been turned into a hotel. Before it became a hotel, it was the childhood home of Rosalind. Julie has brought her mother back to the grounds for a few nights’ stay to reminisce as part of her new artistic project. Like all Victorian homes, there’s something ghostly living amongst the halls, haunting those who stay there.
Like all ghost stories, The Eternal Daughter is a love story. A ghost is merely a memory of a person who will not leave us, lingering in our midst, reminding us of what we’ve lost. Knowing that The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story will likely encourage the viewer to try to parse out who the spectral being is in the film. Is it the grouchy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies)? Or the kindly hotel worker (Joseph Mydell) who always seems to appear in the oddest circumstances? Maybe it’s Julie or Rosalind? Which one, if there even is a ghost in the film, isn’t the main concern of the characters. Instead, it’s words not shared with loved ones who are now gone, it’s the impossibility of new memories with them, and the reckoning of that loneliness.
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A heavy fog coats the grounds around the hotel. It’s oppressive, a metaphor for the overwhelming memories that come back to Rosalind and Julie the longer they stay in the hotel rooms. Good memories, bad memories, all of them. You cannot pick and choose what you remember, let alone when those memories return to you. The fog and memories roll in and obscure everything around them. Reality becomes difficult to discern and you are at the mercy of your memory.
While The Eternal Daughter is an interesting concept, effortlessly supported by both of Swinton’s performances, the relationship between mother and daughter isn’t as developed as one would like. Instead of digging into their storied relationship, Julie is left to her own devices to work on developing her film project about her mother. The times when Julie and Rosalind attempt to parse through their relationship are when The Eternal Daughter excels. The decision to allow Swinton to play both mother and daughter, and Hogg’s constant use of mirrors, both demonstrate the inescapable ways mothers and daughters reflect one another. While not as technically sound as Hogg’s The Souvenir Parts I and II, The Eternal Daughter is again proof of Swinton’s commanding power.
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