Few filmmakers do “personal cinema” as well as Joanna Hogg, largely because she eschews the subgenre’s navel-gazing sentimentality in favor of a scab-scratching honesty. In both The Souvenir and The Souvenir: Part II, two dramas rooted in Hogg’s memories of film school, the personal parameters were obvious. That’s less the case with The Eternal Daughter in that it is, essentially, a ghost story. (If you want a snootier description, consider it a melding of The Shining and Last Year at Marienbad.) The movie follows a mother and daughter—both played by Tilda Swinton—as they spend a few days together at a moody English estate turned hotel. Aside from a difficult desk manager (Carly-Sophia Davies) and a kindly groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell), no one else is in sight. Are they the only guests? Both wonder. Green lampshades cast a sickly glow in the dark hallways; fog drifts past the windows at all times of night and day. The bold decision to cast Swinton in a double role pays dividends in the way it emphasizes the emotional claustrophobia of both story and setting. Rosalind, the mother, remembers visiting the estate as a child when it belonged to relatives, but finds her memories to be a “muddle.” Julia, the daughter, hopes to mine those memories for a film project, but admits she doesn’t know if she has “a right to do such a thing” and can’t make much progress when she tries to get some writing done in a secluded upper room. They’re stuck in a purgatory of sorts; it’s up to the viewer to puzzle out what kind. Strange and vaporous, The Eternal Daughter confirms Hogg as a filmmaker who knows how to transmute her most intimate ruminations in cinematically provocative ways.
(11/28/2022)
