Film review: The Eternal Daughter is ghostly good

Tilda Swinton stars - twice! - in this eerie story of a filmmaker and her elderly mother

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Tilda Swinton has been having a weird time of it. In just the Twenties, she’s narrated the Icelandic science-fiction mystery Last and First Men, starred in a surreal short by Pedro Almodovar, and played scholars, one who meets an ancient genie (Three Thousand Years of Longing), the other exploring an enigmatic aural emanation (Memoria). You can hear her in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio as the calm, gentle voice of Death.

All of which is to say that The Eternal Daughter, from writer/director Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir I and II), isn’t even the oddest thing she’s done of late, though it’s plenty peculiar. She stars as Julie Hart, a filmmaker trying without much success to write a new screenplay about her mother. But she also plays the mother, Rosalind. As our story opens, the two are en route to a nearly deserted manor-house-turned-country-inn where, once upon a time, the elder Hart once lived.

Things seem off from the get-go. The cabbie relates a story of how he got married on the property, and of a mysterious figure that appeared in one of the wedding photos, in the window of a supposedly empty room. Then there’s the fact that the hotel looks like it’s lit entirely by 40-Watt bulbs. Even the film’s title feels creepy, like something carved on a Victorian’s tombstone.

Hogg fills every corner of every frame, and every second of the accompanying soundtrack, with quiet dread. The wind howls, floorboards creak, unseen windows rattle and bang. There’s an occasional ethereal humming, as if the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey were staying in the next room. Speaking of which, the score sounds at times like some of the more mournful selections of that movie’s classical backing.

And yet The Eternal Daughter never flowers into full-fledged frights, preferring to remain forever on the edge, like a shivering fit that refuses to pass. It is, in many ways, all the more disturbing for that, though viewers who like a tidy resolution may find the film’s ending frustratingly opaque. I kept being reminded of the 2017 supernatural drama A Ghost Story, in which the spectral figure is not the object of horror, but merely the film’s protagonist.

Swinton is great in the dual role – whether for budgetary or artistic reasons, Hogg almost never places the two characters in the same shot, which results in a pleasantly jarring bit of cross-cutting, and the unsettling suspicion that perhaps one of them is imagining the other.

The hotel staff seems real enough, including Joseph Mydell as a kindly manager, and Carly-Sophia Davies as the receptionist/waitress, presiding over her roles with stereotypical British efficient indifference. The film was shot in Wales, though presumably not with the blessing of the local tourism board.

Mothers and daughters have played a big part in Hogg’s other movies, with Swinton herself taking on the role of her actual daughter’s mother in The Souvenir. The Eternal Daughter is a less straightforward examination of the filial bond, but it is a wonderfully atmospheric tale. “One view called me to another, one hilltop to its fellow” might describe the way it pulls viewers along. It’s also the opening of They, a 1904 ghost story by Rudyard Kipling, which someone in the film has chosen as bedtime reading. Make of that what you will.

The Eternal Daughter opens Dec. 9 in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Victoria, and later in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver and St. Catharines, with other locations to follow.

4 stars out of 5

1. 

   Read Chris Knight's review of Memoria...

2. ...and The Souvenir, Part II

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