‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Tilda Swinton Doubles Down in Joanna Hogg’s Elusive, Minor-Key Motherhood Mystery
Jessica Kiang A mysterious nighttime mist swirls through Joanna Hogg’s sorrowful, secluded “The Eternal Daughter.” It is pumped, in artificial, Hammer-horror puffs and plumes, across groves and gravel driveways. It snakes around gables topped with gargoyles, snags on hedges, rubs against dark, staring, possibly haunted windows. It shrouds the film the way the unspoken words, undefined guilt and unfulfilled duties that exist between maybe every mother and daughter can cloud the truth of their fraught, primal connection. And it is this grave film’s most apposite motif, in being beautiful and mood-making but vaporous: try to grasp it and your hand closes on nothing but a faint, damp chill. Filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton), her aging mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) and Rosalind’s dog Louis (Tilda Swinton’s dog Louis) arrive in a white cab one foggy night at the remote Welsh hotel that Julie has booked for a stay over Rosalind’s December birthday. One of the secrets guarded by the mansion’s imposingly eerie Gothic facade is that it was not always a hotel. It used to belong to Rosalind’s aunt Jocelyn, and as a child during the war, Rosalind stayed here. So there’s a sentimentality to Julie’s choice of the place, as well as a very slightly sneaky agenda, signalled each time she furtively hits record on her phone as Rosalind begins to reminisce: Julie is gleaning material for an upcoming project about her and her mother, though she’s finding it difficult to get started.