Director/Screenplay – Joanna Hogg, Producers – Ed Guiney, Joanna Hogg, Ed Lowe & Emma Norton, Photography – Ed Rutherford, Visual Effects – Ghost VFX, Special Effects Supervisor – Scott MacIntyre, Prosthetics Makeup Designer – Mark Coulier, Production Design – Stephane Collomge. Production Company – BBC Film/Element Pictures/JWH Films.
Tilda Swinton (Julie Hart/Rosalind Hart), Carly Sophia-Davis (Receptionist), Joseph Mydell (Bill)
Filmmaker Julie Hart and her mother go to stay at a hotel in the countryside. The hotel used to be their family home. Julie has brought her mother in the hope that she can jog her memories and write a film about the house. Julie hears noises and thinks maybe there is something in the hotel.
Joanna Hogg is a director who emerged out of British television. She premiered with the film Unrelated (2007) and went on to the likes of Archipelago (2010), Exhibition (2013) and The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), the latter two featuring her first collaboration with Tilda Swinton. All of these rest in the drama categories and feature semi-autobiographical elements. The Eternal Daughter was produced by the BBC, given a release by A24 and is executive produced by no less than Martin Scorsese.
The Eternal Daughter fits into the surprisingly prolific sub-genre of haunted hotel films. The work that defines this theme is without a doubt The Shining (1980), although the field goes all the way back to Last Year in Marienbad (1961) to more recent efforts such as 1408 (2007), The Night (2020) and the Covid-drama Shelter in Place (2021).
The Eternal Daughter would probably not have emerged anywhere beyond a festival release if it did not have Tilda Swinton. Swinton has become an actress who has always courted the arthouse and chosen very different and offbeat roles. As she did in Suspiria (2018), she elects here to play something quite out of the regular acting wheelhouse – in this case, the roles of the titular daughter and her mother. In these she seems determined to join the ranks of actors like Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Eddie Murphy who played multiple roles under much physical disguise, adopting differing characteristics for each. Although the difference is not too difficult to realise, she is so successful at doing so that my viewing companion didn’t pick up on this until halfway through when I pointed they were the same actor.
The film itself is slow and mannered. Nothing much really happens throughout. The scenes are the mundane uneventful stuff of eating dinner, taking the dog for a walk, writing a bunch of letters, and nothing much else. Joanna Hogg makes us think that she is creating a traditional ghost story – the hotel is all mist covered grounds, creaking noises in the building, people thinking they are hearing things or seeing shadows move. The film is certainly photographed in a way that makes us think that is about to become a ghost story at any point. On the other hand, everything feels like it is all set up to be a ghost story – only for nothing to ever happen.
The big question through is [PLOT SPOILERS] – does the mother actually exist? The daughter exits the taxi and signs in and out of the hotel alone. The receptionist (Carly Sophia-Davis) seems to only ever talk to the daughter when she is serving meals, although she does bring two plates at one point. On the other hand, Joseph Mydell’s Bill is aware of the mother and seen talking to her – however, with his dialogues about nearness to his late wife, it could be that he has some extra ability to see the dead.
You could even ask if the hotel exists or is some portal between worlds like the one in The Night or The Halfway House (1944) – there seem to be no other guests and only two members of staff, while much of the time the hotel seems empty and alone. (Although part of this was the fact that Joanna Hogg was shooting during the Covid lockdown and so opted for a minimum of cast).
While other films like The Shining have had entire documentaries devoted to explaining their cryptic plots and clues, Joanna Hogg does nothing to make any of this clear. I strain to see any documentaries or lengthy essays being written to explain the hidden meanings of The Eternal Daughter.
Trailer here