Welcome to MyMovieReview. The Eternal Daughter stars Tilda Swinton twice. There’s no need for another Tilda Swinton movie so I went with Joanna Hogg’s latest, The Eternal Daughter, from Banger Films. They gave us The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part 2.
She’s a very talented director and she’s back again with another kind of relationship in the form of a ghost story. You’ve piqued my interest again starring Tilda Swinton as both mother and daughter.
My interest is not just peaked, it’s through the roof and after watching this, there’s no doubt it was a Joanna Hogg production. I had a really good time with this one. The general premise of this one is that a daughter takes her mother to this big old hotel.
This is a stupidly haunted, creepy old house that feels spooky because of the birthday celebrations and Sutton’s feeling that things are getting a little spooky and mysterious up there. This is a very slow and deliberately placed film from Hogg. Which isn’t too surprising.
I did really like seeing her sensibilities and approach played out in this kind of ghost story format and on that note, the atmosphere was just immaculate in this thing it’s definitely the strongest thing. This film The Eternal Daughter has going for it just the setting of this thing the way that Hogg moves throughout this space with Central performances from the beguiling atmosphere throughout and add to that Ed Rutherford’s really stunning cinematography this thing just has a feel to it which is quite creepy at unsettling.
I do think the pace of this one does threaten to undermine some of that. It definitely does feel like I suppose the most I’ve felt the pace in a Joanne Hulk film as of late. However, thankfully she has a secret weapon up her sleeve for times two with Tilda Swinton.
How much I love Tilda Swinton. She’s incredible. She’s easily the most talented actress of our time and so obviously watching two performances from her in a film was never going to be anything other than just completely captivating. It is because she is amazing in this film.
I love watching her version of Julie navigate this film. I thought she was just immensely watchable in that character. You never really know exactly what’s going on or what she’s feeling or what she’s going through. However, she says a lot with just how she moves around the space and how she presents herself with good stuff from till to there but I equally loved her Rosalind here.
I mean she played Rosalind in the souvenir but this is obviously a different sort of look at that same character. I think one of the amazing things about Tilda is that she’s got a very kind of malleable presence when it comes to gender when it comes to the age she can play old and young in the same film and not feel like we’re watching just tilde twice.
I mean some people will argue that we are but I’m not listening to them but honestly watching Tilda talk to tilde right the dialogue between tilde and tilde at the same table in this film in those scenes. I could have watched that for hours honestly. I think the film The Eternal Daughter is incredibly lucky to have those two Central performances on its tool belt here.
Without them, I’m not entirely convinced that this would have been as captivating a film. However, it does have them. With those, it manages to do a lot of great work to pull all of the atmospheres together and pull the narrative threads together. The narrative of this one does feel relatively simple.
I’ll be honest I kind of knew where this thing was gonna end up going quite early, which was a problem for the film. Joanna Hogg as a director is quite the bigger plot point here as much as she is these characters and mining them for their emotions and what the sort of quiet stuff around them suggests to us as an audience.
She’s got a fantastic ability to draw that out for us as an audience and whilst this isn’t the most effective I’ve seen her do that it does still do a really good job at pulling out emotional threads. One thing that did slightly frustrate me about the film is there is another sort of let’s call it a hogism it’s a fun word hogism yeah. This is the inclusion of the kind of more slightly meta elements.
This film doesn’t get anywhere near as meta as something like the souvenir part 2 does. However, there is another meta element to this in Julie’s writing a script while she’s there at this hotel with her mum. The film is about her and her mum going to a hotel.
It does weave that into the film and we do see her writing elements of the film in a screenplay in the film. However, I’m not entirely sure that the film even needed that. I think the film says what it needs to say and does what it needs to do without that.
It’s good just being a very slow-burn ghost story with these two characters at the front of it. This is good stuff not quite to the level of her previous stuff. However, an interesting enough Little Ghost Story here.
- 6.3/10 at IMDb
- 96% at Rotten Tomatoes