The Eternal Daughter

Dir. Joanna Hogg

English

United Kingdom, 2022

Recently, the cinema I find myself indulging in has led me to discover a new form of expressionism. One that concerns itself less with plot and logic and more with consequence and emotional impact. Most notably, Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) flung logic far out the window when a young girl meets the child version of her mother while wandering around the woods one day. On the basis of that logline, if you expect a sci-fi mystery, your expectations may be quite spectacularly glutted. So is the case with this “horror film”, ‘The Eternal Daughter’. Sacrificing the logic of a story to prioritize its effect on the audience may be a tricky wire to walk on, nonetheless, this film, with Joanna Hogg and two, yes two Tilda Swintons at its helm, tread it with poetic balance.

Julie (Tilda Swinton) a filmmaker, plans a little getaway with her elderly mother Rosiland (also Swinton) to a manor that at one time used to be Rosalind’s family home. Their stay is ridden with peculiarities both of the natural, a particularly rude and laid back receptionist cum waitress, and the unnatural, haunting apparitions, sounds, and creaks that bellow from the undercarriage of the old manor’s wooden floorboards. Furthermore, the location brings to the fore eerily vivid and sad memories for Rosiland which causes Julie to bear some guilt over having caused any discomfort to her mother. Worrying over her mother’s health and well-being Julie feels she’s neglected all other relationships in her life and childless she feels remorse over living down her mother’s expectations. Her role as the dutiful, post-menopausal offspring will eternally remain that of the daughter.

Most of ‘The Eternal Daughter’ sees Julie looking down long hallways or outside windows, searching for the origins of mysterious sounds that keep her awake at night. ‘The Eternal Daughter’ can most aptly be described as a horror film that’s not about the horror, thus subverting your expectations by binding its structure with something you’d least expect, by prioritising the expressive. Although it's the dimly lit, foggy manor that descriptively and aurally does most of the heavy lifting haunting-wise, in reality, it’s Julie’s guilt that’s literally the ghost. Hogg repeatedly returns to frames of great negative space that almost look like it's accommodating some other being as well as those of lengthy hallways with the greens of many-a exit signs much brighter than usual allowing the manor to visually lend itself to the haunting and perhaps subversively, in stereotypical horror film fashion beckon, “Get out!”

Swinton’s double role is frankly quite immersive so much so that you forget that the two lead characters share an actress. Cleverly framed separately in multiple shot-reverse-shots, when the mother and daughter duo finally share a frame the emotional timing indicates a shift away from linear logic into something more existential. Hogg’s study of this bond in such an expressive manner is diagnostic of her own guilt, in that the artistic process of making this film is quite clearly an attempt to reconcile with.