‘The Eternal Daughter’ movie review: Tilda Swinton is the lonely heartbeat in Joanna Hogg’s eerie, distant world
Joanna Hogg’s film is a haunting exploration of trauma and the pangs of remembrance, but something is excruciating and unsettling in how it reveals and layers itself
(Originally published in The Hindu on March 05, 2023)
Filmmaker Joanna Hogg wants you to feel unsettled in The Eternal Daughter, her third with The Souvenir series. The film deftly and hauntingly explores themes of trauma and the pangs of remembrance through a story about a mother and a daughter (both played by Tilda Swinton); the setting is a secluded old castle-turned-hotel surrounded by fog and woods, and the sounds of chill winds filtering through the wooden cracks further add to the eerieness. But minutes into the film, a sense of uneasiness germinates outside the frames and into the minds of the audience, for this is a film that takes all time to reveal itself and you cannot trust anything you are shown. By that, I mean that The Eternal Daughter shows its trump cards but also lies about them. Everything about this film seems unreliable, which would work if there was more to back it.
Julie takes her mother Rosalind on her birthday to an old castle where the latter spent most of her life in. Julie wants to make a film about her mother’s life but struggles with the dilemma of if that would be trespassing. Further, we also realise that her mother is a puzzle she cannot solve and the intricacies of the relationship add more burden on Julie’s shoulders. She is also kept awake at night by a peculiar noise from the top floor window, and she spends the nights walking through the dark, lonely stairwells, halls, and courtyards of the hotel. The metaphorical and literal supernatural apparition that she witnesses add to the tension in the atmosphere.
Tracing through the stay of this mother and daughter in this secluded, The Shining-esque hotel, The Eternal Daughter feels like a lucid dream on a cold night. From start to finish, everything about it is…
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