You get a double dose of Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter, writer/director Joanna Hogg’s “lockdown movie”, shot with a skeleton cast in a secluded Welsh hotel and making the most of the pared-down vibe.
Swinton plays both Julie and Rosalind, a daughter/mother duo who have come to Moel Famau Hall (as Soughton Hall has been renamed) because it used to be Rosalind’s family home decades before. There they get a not unfamiliar reception – there’s no food because it’s late and the kitchen is shut, the rooms they have booked are not free, the wi-fi is wonky and the receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) is cool to the point of hostility. It’s all a bit Fawlty Towers without the jokes.
But film-maker Julie and her mother Rosalind settle in, with Louis the dog (Swinton’s own), and make the best of it, working their way through the scant menu over the following days, with the surly receptionist also doubling as a grudging waitress.
From here, building towards Rosalind’s impending birthday, mother and daughter have conversations that are superficially banal. But Julie is after something. She regularly switches on the voice memo app on her phone without her mother realising. What’s Julie fishing for? Some revelation from the past, it would seem. As the birthday comes closer, Julie digs a little further, using memories stirred by the old building – “Do you remember this room?” – as a prompt.
Hogg has tricked the whole thing out like something from the long-running BBC series A Ghost Story for Christmas. She shoots on grainy 16mm film, as A Ghost Story for Christmas has done since 1971, and majors on mood – fog swirls incessantly, the sound design emphasises echoes and creaks, clanking pipes and squeaky door hinges, the music is a mournful flute and a few string instruments.
The spirit of writer MR James hangs heavy on this one and it seems like a fair guess, with all the swirling, creaking and mournfulness, that someone must be dead. The mother, the daughter, perhaps the receptionist? And who’s that strange man (Joseph Mydell) who keeps on popping up here and there to utter something cryptic or pregnant with foreboding? Is he dead too?
It’s unlike Hogg to do minimalist gothic. Her films – see The Souvenir, Archipelago, Exhibition – normally have a psychological yet vividly naturalistic ambience. But that’s what she’s about here, invoking the atmosphere of an old fashioned spooky story to say something about haunting as a less ghostly phenomenon. Once we get to somewhere around Julie’s age we’re all carrying something spectral with us – a dead relative, usually. But should we hang on to them, or let them go?
Swinton fans get plenty of her. She’s in every scene, usually playing two roles – she’d do the daughter in the morning and then the mother in the afternoon, apparently (or vice versa) – a white wig and a slight clipping of the accent all that’s necessary to make the transition from inquisitive middle-aged woman to accepting retiree. Spare a thought for Carly-Sophia Davies in her debut role, going up against two Swintons. She does well.
The reveal, when it comes, won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been even half watching, and the fact that the whole thing takes place in the run-up to Christmas only makes it seem more certain what the outcome is going to be. But there’s also the suggestion that Hogg is making a shadowy version of Kubrick’s The Shining – creative type away from it all with family member(s) is confronted by something in a vast spooky building in winter. There’s even Bartok on the soundtrack as the end credits roll, as there was in The Shining. Interesting.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
