The Eternal Daughter
Photo: A24

The Eternal Daughter Review: Joanna Hogg’s Mother-Daughter Ghost Story

The film is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.

The most obvious point of comparison for Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter among genre films is undoubtedly Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, considering their shared setting of a hotel in wintertime that’s empty except for one family and a strange paranormal presence. But perhaps the more thematically relevant analogue is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, given the pronounced pull of a green light in the hallway of the hotel in Hogg’s film.

This emerald glow regularly transfixes Tilda Swinton’s Julie, an artist visiting the Moel Famau hotel in Flintshire, Wales, that was formerly an ancestral home in her family, stopping her dead in her tracks as she roves the premises looking for answers both practical and existential. She pines for this light to provide the same strange effect as it did for James Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson when he attempted to fulfill pent-up desire and longing in human form by “transforming” Kim Novak’s Judy into Madeleine. But Julie soon discovers that she cannot count on supernatural forces to illuminate what must come from her own inquisition.

The Eternal Daughter once again finds Hogg working in meta-fictional mode, folding the process of making the film into its very structure. Unlike in The Souvenir and its sequel, though, Hogg’s stand-in isn’t seeking to convert her own life into art. Rather, the source material she seeks to mine is the childhood experiences of her mother, Rosalind (also played by Swinton, aged up with some light makeup and a gray wig). The manifest purpose of Julie’s visit to the hotel is a birthday trip for her mom. Yet each meal shared, gift bequeathed, or room visited bears the ulterior motive of prompting her mother’s memories to fuel her next screenplay.

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But with each surreptitious phone recording of her recollections, the artist moves no closer to the emotional truth or firm sense of history that she seeks to charge forward in her fictionalizations. Throughout The Eternal Daughter, the stories and observations offered by “Ros” complicate the simplistic narrative of the World War II-era youth conveyed to Julie in her younger years, and it leaves her with even less of an idea where to begin this personal project.

Ros becomes as tough to grasp for her daughter as a resolution to the lingering sense that something is just a bit off about the hotel. From the opening scene in which the cabbie transporting them warns of seeing faces in one of the hotel windows during the winter, discontent gnaws away at Julie. This manifests in everything from her frustrated interactions with a mercurial front desk employee (Carly Sophia-Davies), so droll in their unspoken sense of class conflict that they could have been beamed in from The White Lotus, to the late-night walks around the premises trying to identify the source of mysterious noises. These are sensations that Julie can recognize when they stir her, but finding the words to express just how they do so takes so long that, by then, she no longer feels them. Instead of trying to articulate the mysterious mood, she often remains in a state of stupefied silence.

Hogg finds the resonance of Julie’s reticence, using the overlapping layers of the film to highlight the many ways in which enlightenment proves elusive when dealing with people and their pasts. The horror tropes in which she trades—the gentle hum of electrical static, the whipping wind rustling the barren trees—help give further expression to the agonizing sense of absence lingering paradoxically in presence that plays out on a more personal scale between Julie and Ros. Hogg began imagining the supernatural and realist elements of The Eternal Daughter in siloed development, but it feels impossible to consider one without the other now.

This looming specter of something missing haunts the characters’ interactions with, as well as their formulations of, one another. For Julie, it’s the mother she can never fully understand from the sparse snippets of a faintly remembered past that she’s willing to dole out. For Ros, it’s the childless daughter who will never fully comprehend her life and choices without ever assuming a matriarchal role. These projections of insecurity and uncertainty about what never was—and never can be—weigh over their sparse exchanges of pleasantries and anecdotes far more mightily than any apparition. Only when Julie’s recognition of how shepherding a film from idea to existence represents a maternal instinct can the haunting begin to abate.

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David Foster Wallace is credited with popularizing the phrase, “Every love story is a ghost story.” In The Eternal Daughter, Hogg proves that every mother-daughter story is a ghost story as well. Cross-generational understanding depends on conjuring the sense of a parent’s self that has either disappeared into the vagaries of memory or been divested into their children. When the former option fails for Julie, she’s forced to locate the missing components in herself and in her art. It’s in this self-reflexiveness where the double casting of Swinton pays its mightiest dividends, showing the inexorable connection between mother and daughter as well as the unbridgeable divides that separate them. Cinematographer Ed Rutherford’s decision to shoot Julie and Rosalind’s conversations in dueling individual shots rather than masters amplifies the sense of isolation that persists despite the women’s immediacy.

It’s a longer process to see oneself in another than to look deep into one’s own soul. The Eternal Daughter takes a purposefully more limited scope than Hogg’s last two films to reflect a still-developing sense of experiences beyond her own, though her insights into the character of Ros do not feel half-baked. This narrowed focus does have the side effect of her latest cinematic ouroboros feeling slightly more self-contained and self-satisfied. She’s also cheating out to the audience less, offering fewer generalizable takeaways in favor of a more ecstatic representation of her own journey. But while The Souvenir films end in a hard-won sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, The Eternal Daughter is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.

Score: 
 Cast: Tilda Swinton, August Joshi, Carly-Sophia Davis, Joseph Mydell, Crispin Buxton  Director: Joanna Hogg  Screenwriter: Joanna Hogg  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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