The Eternal Daughter begins with the filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton) bringing her elderly mother (also Tilsa Swinton) for a getaway at an Welsh country hotel. It’s an enormous, sinister-looking edifice, a Victorian building of Gothic design. When the building creaks and goes bump in the night, mysterious figures appear at windows and there’s knocking from supposedly unoccupied rooms, The Eternal Daughter has all of the trappings of a haunted house movie.
Mom and daughter appear to be the only visitors, although hotel staff insists otherwise. They are at the mercy of the hotel’s receptionist/manager/server (Carly-Sophia Davies), who, to a hilarious extent, could not be any more disinterested in her guests’ happiness ,comfort or approval.
Julie’s experience at the hotel is one of persistent dissatisfaction. She wants to work, but the only WiFi signal is three floors above their room, and she has sporadic cell phone service only in one special spot outside. Her requests to get the room they actually reserved and the expected amenities are stonewalled by the receptionist.
Her hot button, however, is that she doesn’t feel that she is bringing her mother any happiness. It turns out that this trip is a birthday treat for her mother, who had stayed in this house as a child during WW II. The mother is serene and uncomplaining, except to object to Julie “fussing” over her. Julie has microplanned every detail, down to lighting the candle on the mom’s birthday cake, but Julie doesn’t think she is doing anything right.
What’s going on in this slow burn? It turns out that writer-director Joanna Hogg isn’t taking us to a haunted house or to a comedy of manners in a bad hotel. This is a psychological drama. Julie is haunted, alright, but it’s by her relationship with her mother, which she’s having a very hard time figuring out.
Joanna Hogg is a veteran director who got the chance to become an auteur at age 59, beginning in 2019 with The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II in 2021.The Eternal Daughter is the third of these highly personal, apparently autographical films, with the Julie character as Hogg’s alter ego. In those films, Julie was played by Honor Swinton Byrne (Tilda Swinton’s real life daughter) and Swinton played Julie’s mom.
All three films are personal, as in specific and decidedly NOT universal. Although I am generally not a fan of naval-gazing, Hogg’s genius as a filmmaker is such that The Eternal Daughter and its siblings, slow burns all, are mesmerizing.