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‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Two Glorious Sides of Tilda Swinton

The actress astonishes in two roles in Joanna Hogg’s haunting film set in a creaky castle in Wales.

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Tilda Swinton in a print dress carrying a birthday cake with a single candle in an 18th-century mansion.

By Manohla Dargis

“The Eternal Daughter,” a lovely and haunted dream of a movie from the director of “The Souvenir,” opens on a spectral scene at dusk. On a desolate country road shrouded in fog and bordered by bare trees, sounds of the wind and lonely music drift on the soundtrack as spindly branches reach across the frame like fingers. By the time taxi headlights pierce the fog, your head may be churning with thoughts of ghosts and fanged demons, the kind that emerge from the shadows in old horror films to trouble your sleep.

I imagine that the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg has a passing acquaintance with some of those movies, even if her work is rarefied enough to constitute its own auteurist genre. “The Souvenir,” which brought Hogg a wider audience, is a memory piece about a young woman’s devastating first love. The tragedy is crushingly sad, even if its conclusion is foregone. What gives it and other of Hogg’s movies their power aren’t their stories per se but her distinctive style and how she elicits meaning with emotional intimacy and intellectual reserve, creating realism from silences, gazes and rooms that become worlds.

There are two women passengers in the taxi, a middle-aged filmmaker, Julie, and her mother, Rosalind, along with the mother’s dog, Louis, a soulful springer spaniel. The women are striking, dressed in understated clothing that quietly announces their privileged station before either speaks a word. Julie is talking to the driver while Rosalind seems to be sleeping, a gloved hand resting on Louis. Julie’s hair is auburn, her face pale and lightly creased, while Rosalind seems washed in gray. They make a vivid, arresting pair, all the more so because both characters are played by an astonishing Tilda Swinton.

Julie and Rosalind are in Wales for a brief visit. They’re staying in a rambling hotel, an imposing, 18th-century mansion topped with gables and stone heraldic beasts. There are different reasons that mother and daughter are traveling together, including nearby relations, an impending birthday and a potential film project. As Julie explains later, during a conversation with a sympathetic caretaker, Bill (Joseph Mydell), one of the few other people around, she has come to the hotel to try and write a film about her and her mother. But she’s having trouble getting started. “I’m not sure that I feel I have a right to do such a thing.”

Not much happens at first beyond Julie’s amusingly testy, politely antagonistic exchange at check-in with the hotel receptionist (a dryly funny Carly-Sophia Davies). The women settle into their room, a cozy double lined with toile wallpaper and furnished with separate beds and some strategically placed mirrors that Hogg soon has wicked fun with. Mother and daughter are close, though Julie’s doting on Rosalind isn’t always welcome. Rosalind spends a lot of time in bed; she also seems untroubled by the mansion’s eerie noises, its spooky gloom and the loud rhythmic banging that keeps Julie up at night.

Given Hogg’s interest in memory and her expressionistic use of space it was perhaps inevitable that she’d make a ghost story, though “The Eternal Daughter” doesn’t as much conform to the genre template as playfully nip at its edges. It’s not for nothing that the first words you hear are “well, there was something strange….” Yet while Hogg comes at genre obliquely, she also makes great use of horror’s greatest hits by deploying creaking doors, billowing curtains and ominous shadows. And then there’s the pale-gray face at a window that Julie sees at night while out walking the dog.

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“The Eternal Daughter,” Reviewed: A Tour de Force for Tilda Swinton

My favorite dual role in movies—other than Charlie Chaplin ’s, in “The Great Dictator,” of course—is the mother and daughter played by Frances Farmer, in Howard Hawks’s “ Come and Get It .” I’m reminded of this by Tilda Swinton’s spectacular achievement as mother and child, in Joanna Hogg’s new film, “The Eternal Daughter” (opening Friday in theatres and on video on demand). Unlike Farmer’s roles, which are secondary to the movie’s male lead character, at least one of Swinton’s two characters is onscreen in every scene, and the movie’s few other actors are in supporting roles. “The Eternal Daughter” is very much a two-hander for one actor, an astonishing tour de force for Swinton’s art and for Hogg’s writing and direction—all the more so inasmuch as it’s a sequel, the third in a series. As in Hogg’s “ The Souvenir ” (2019) and “ The Souvenir: Part II ” (2021), Swinton plays Rosalind, the mother of a young film student named Julie Hart (Honor Swinton Byrne, Swinton’s real-life daughter). Now, in “The Eternal Daughter,” Julie returns, as a middle-aged woman (Swinton) who, in chilly late November, takes the elderly widow Rosalind (also Swinton) on a brief vacation in Wales, in a remote and majestic hotel. They are there to celebrate Rosalind’s birthday; Julie is plotting to make a movie about her mother.

“The Eternal Daughter” is a keenly discerning movie about the relationship of mother and daughter, who are bound together by a fierce love but kept apart by unbridgeable differences of character and of experience. Theatrically elaborate and nuanced, the film attains a level of hushed and whispery detail that suggests dramatic hyperrealism, as if it were made with cameras of resolution higher than the eye can perceive. Swinton’s performances are more intimate than those in any classic movie I can think of, and adorned with a dazzling array of behavioral and linguistic wisps and whorls. Yet Swinton isn’t the sole focus of the movie’s fanatically detailed attention. The hotel, a converted ancient mansion, is seemingly a character unto itself, and the only one that competes with mother and daughter for dramatic impact—because it’s haunted. For all the probing, urgent realism of “The Eternal Daughter,” the film depends not only on technical artifices—ones that make it possible for Swinton to share scenes and even images with herself—but on metaphysical artifice. It’s a ghost story.

It’s a graceful and fluid movie to watch but a difficult one to describe or even to grasp, seemingly by design. It’s mysterious, elusive, and, for all its weighty and palpable physical reality, for all its pressing concentration on its characters and their surroundings, it shunts much of the action not offscreen but to what’s in the frame but invisible—to spiritual presences that are both ubiquitous and inaccessible. Which is to say that the movie turns its metaphysical premise inside out, realizing it by means of plain special effects and simple devices—the first of which is a mere line of dialogue. As the movie opens, the two women and Rosalind’s faithful dog, Louis, are arriving by taxi to the inn; their driver (August Joshi) tells them that he avoids the hotel at night, owing to a sighting of a person in the window of an unoccupied ground-floor room. This setup—call it Chekhov’s ghost—makes surveillance of the ground-floor windows a key focus of the drama. Even apart from any awaited apparitions, though, the movie is filled with uncanny virtual presences that are invoked by the merest of banalities.

As Julie checks into the hotel, the officious young desk clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies) tells her that the second-floor room she’s reserved is unavailable—and she wants to park Julie and Rosalind in a ground-floor room instead (hint, hint). The hotel seems, however, to be completely devoid of other guests—not a single one is seen throughout the pair’s stay, and the keys for each room are still hanging in their respective slots. It’s only when, by special dispensation, mother and daughter are temporarily parked in a room upstairs that the building’s hidden souls begin to emerge, in the form of memory—and of history. Julie and Rosalind, as it turns out, didn’t select the hotel by chance. It was originally a private mansion and the home of Rosalind’s aunt, who took in Rosalind and other young relatives during the Second World War, to spare them the bombing of London. Each room that Rosalind enters, starting with the one in which they sleep, gives rise to a new round of her recollections, which she divulges to Julie with a matter-of-fact equanimity regarding even tragic and pain-filled events. Hogg’s view of the intimate gulf between the two women is essentially historical, a generation gap rooted in the incommensurable difference of the times they’ve lived in, and its decisive effect on their character, on their expectations, on their very identity.

The women fill their days and nights with minor activities, which grow increasingly charged with oddities, tensions, and perturbations that occasionally discharge a spark of creative energy. Even such trivialities as Julie’s nocturnal jaunt through empty corridors and back rooms in a vain quest for a kettle and her odd, mutually fussy interaction with the clerk the next morning to request one make the place feel off-kilter, the time out of joint. The brusque clerk is also the waitress in a formal dining room in which Rosalind and Julie are always the only diners, and where the victuals emerge promptly and tastily despite the apparent absence of any chef. Rosalind schleps to those meals a white plastic bag filled with photos, letters, and other memorabilia, which seem to serve mainly to get in the waitress’s way. Yet, amid the strangeness, the rooms and their furnishings continue to prompt Rosalind’s reminiscences—and Julie’s surreptitious recordings of them—even as the elder woman teases her daughter about eventually becoming the subject of one of her films.

Along the way, Julie encounters a friendly groundskeeper named Bill (Joseph Mydell), who shares confidences with her regarding his own memories and losses. The movie is constructed largely as dialogue-based duos, sometimes involving Bill, the unnamed clerk, or an intrusive cousin (Crispin Buxton), but mainly centered on Julie and Rosalind. The two women’s dialogue—amazingly, improvised by Swinton—is both copious and crystalline, compact and sharp, glittering and lucid. It’s not so much delivered as incarnated in extended scenes, for which Hogg devises a quietly daring array of angles, a cannily crafted framework of related physical action.

In both roles, Swinton holds the extended scrutiny of Hogg’s many and varied closeups, and her performances are perched at the delicate edge of craft—a matter of controlled gestures and calibrated diction—and sheer presence. The movie’s costumes, hair styling, and makeup have much to do with Swinton’s expansive physicality; I’ve rarely seen an actor artificially aged with such uncanny persuasiveness. At Rosalind’s formal birthday celebration, Julie’s easy, bourgeois-bohemian stylishness yields to a dressed-up, brushed-down severity that portends the strangeness of the event—which culminates in Julie’s eerie, dirgelike incantation of “Happy Birthday to You.”

That climactic sequence is capped by a plain and simple cut, from one image to another, which is among the most disorientingly audacious dramatic strokes in any recent movie. With the movie’s visual compositions (the cinematographer is Ed Rutherford) and its editing (by Helle le Fevre), Hogg develops a mastery of time that puts it outside—indeed, beyond—the mode of “slow cinema” and turns it into a tensely incremental cinema. Above all, the movie’s sense of tempo is the finest I’ve experienced in a recent film, calibrated seemingly musically, like a composition with an over-all marking of “andante” that nonetheless teems with event and agitation. Hogg’s quasi-musical sensibility yields such repetitive yet varied gestures as Julie looking out the window to watch the clerk head off, at night, into a friend’s waiting car, and glancing at herself in a recurring set of mirrors. Rosalind, too, with the stolid grace of her formalities, is given a set of repeated actions that play like variations on a theme, such as licking a finger to take a sleeping pill from an enamel pillbox or taking breakfast in bed with a distinctive posture. The insistent, motto-like recurrence of a theme from Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” adds another element to Hogg’s cinematic counterpoint—and even the the hotel itself derives its dramatic identity above all from a visual identity built on a repetitive framework of motifs, as in the vision of flimsy curtains undulating in the breeze, the perspectives afforded by the inn’s ziggurat of staircases and landings and corridors, the vistas accessible from its various windows.

It was a surprise to learn, from my colleague Rebecca Mead’s Profile of Hogg in The New Yorker , that the décor in “The Souvenir” was exactingly devised as “an inch-by-inch reconstruction of Hogg’s elegant student digs,” because the movie does nothing of visual interest with that décor—the film is a collection of dramatic scenes acted well and filmed merely functionally, as if the mere fact of telling a personal story sufficed. The two “Souvenir” films are made on a much larger dramatic scale but are literal, amplified by little in the way of style or symbol. “The Eternal Daughter” is an entirely different kind of movie. Its chamber-music-like limits expand Hogg’s imagination and refine her aesthetic sensibility; the presence of the phantasmagorical renders her direction fanatically attentive to material details; the trickery of a dual role makes her even more alert to the intimate realities of gesture and diction; and the story’s confinement in a single building opens her speculative vision to a historical span that makes the very walls shudder with its vast implications.

The mansion-cum-inn is a limbo-like repository for memories, which, once they get in, never get out, but only fill it invisibly to the breaking point. In “The Eternal Daughter,” the inner lives of others remain closed books, and this is why there are no happy memories; the past lives on only in the deceptive and ungraspable forms of ghosts and in the mutely inanimate ones of objects and places—and, then, only in the modes of grief, guilt, and fear. With its firmly material elusiveness, the movie builds a mighty emotional complex of family tragedy, the horrors of war, the mutual incomprehension of parents and children, the unslaked anguish of married life, and the inescapable presence of the dead. Moreover, the film suggests the essential inaccessibility of this vast realm of emotion, except, somehow, at great personal and moral cost, by way of the method chosen by Julie, and by Hogg herself: in the art and the artifice of movies. ♦

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The Eternal Daughter is a quiet ghost story with a double dose of Tilda Swinton

The latest release from director joanna hogg is a slow and steady contemplation of life and death, with tilda swinton playing both lead roles..

By Andrew Webster , an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

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A photo of Tilda Swinton as Julie in The Eternal Daughter.

The first thing that you should know about The Eternal Daughter, the latest film from director Joanna Hogg, is that it’s not as spooky as the trailer makes it seem . It is indeed a ghost story, one with some unsettling moments and themes, but the scariest thing about the movie is its frighteningly realistic depiction of familial relationships and how they can be damaged by grief. The second thing you should know is that Tilda Swinton plays her own mother, and she’s incredible.

The film appears to be set in the same semi-autobiographical universe as Hogg’s The Souvenir films and centers on a daughter and her elderly mother as they visit a quaint Welsh hotel. (Both characters are played by Swinton.) It’s the kind of old building that has spotty cell reception, Wi-Fi that only works on the top floor, and all kinds of creaks and bangs to keep you awake at night. It’s not just a simple getaway, though; the hotel was once the family home of the mother, Rosalind, and every room seems to remind her of something from her younger days. Often, they’re not happy memories. The daughter, Julie, is hoping to use the time to both get closer to her mother and get started working on a film about their relationship in the aftermath of her father’s death a few years prior.

The Eternal Daughter is a sparse film. This is most noticeable with the cast: the two characters played by Swinton appear to be the sole tenants in the hotel, and the only other people with meaningful screen time are a delightfully cranky hotel clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies) and a warm, fatherly groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell). This stripped-down nature makes each performance shine. Swinton, in particular, does a brilliant job of playing both characters; Julie is played with a neurotic undercurrent as she fusses over every detail about the hotel room and her mother, while Rosalind does her best to stay strong as the memories come flooding in. You can see both of them slowly crack as the film progresses.

A photo of Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter.

That sparseness, and the quietness it creates, is what makes the film so unnerving. Like Hogg’s previous work, The Eternal Daughter is full of scenes of mundanity: the mother and daughter spending minutes debating what to eat at the hotel restaurant (when there are only four options) or Julie taking her mom’s adorable dog for a walk while searching for the one spot on the grounds with good reception. The two fall into a rhythm over their days at the hotel, and sights and sounds become familiar. Things as simple as the server’s loud footsteps cutting through the silence at dinner become jarring.

This is also what helps give the film its unnerving tone. No, there aren’t any jump scares or more overtly scary moments. But amid all of the quiet, there are scenes that create a creepy subtext, a bit like a Gothic romance where the ghosts are more sad than anything else. Julie has trouble sleeping at night because of loud banging windows that no one else seems to hear, and at certain times in the evening, she catches glimpses of an old woman’s face in a window. The tension builds as these unresolved mysteries continue, while at the same time, the pair struggles to communicate. Julie just wants to make her mom happy, but Rosalind can’t help but be overwhelmed as each day seems to bring a new memory to the surface. By the time the big (and not that hard to predict) twist happens, the weight of grief and family drama becomes almost too much to bear.

So no, The Eternal Daughter isn’t a scary film that just missed spooky season. But it is one that manages to create a full and emotionally exhaustive picture of a family by only using a few expertly crafted tools, unease being just one of them. Plus, it has twice as much Tilda as any other movie this year.

The Eternal Daughter hits theaters and on-demand services on December 2nd.

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‘the eternal daughter’ review: a double dose of tilda swinton in joanna hogg’s partly effective stylistic swerve.

Swinton plays both mother and daughter in what is effectively a third episode in the 'Souvenir' series, competing for the top Venice prize.

By Leslie Felperin

Leslie Felperin

Contributing Film Critic

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The Eternal Daughter Still - TIFF - Publicity - H 2022

After the success of her paired portrait-of-the-artist features The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II , British writer-director Joanna Hogg takes a stylistic swerve with The Eternal Daughter , a melancholy winter’s tale with horror elements.

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‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Tilda Swinton Doubles Down in Joanna Hogg’s Elusive, Minor-Key Motherhood Mystery

Swinton plays a mother and daughter struggling to connect through mutual reticence in the 'Souvenir' director's similarly withholding ghost story.

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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.

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If Hogg were presenting her film as a straightforward drama, it would be a cunning, perhaps even crushing decision. But given the overt horror and haunted-house-movie references throughout — the canted angles of giallo; the chafing strings of Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta,” which was also mined for “The Shining”; a split diopter shot straight out of Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents,” and so on — the film comes freighted with genre expectations that it is not particularly interested in fulfilling, and soon starts to feel like an unnecessarily drawn-out wait for a reveal we know is coming from the start. The double casting of Swinton, who is predictably excellent in both roles, is certainly the key to “The Eternal Daughter,” but whether it frees the film or locks it further away is debatable.

Julie gets off on the wrong foot with the surly, subtly hostile hotel receptionist (a terrific, darkly funny screen debut from Carly-Sophia Davis), a young woman who couldn’t more obviously care less about Julie’s quite reasonable requests — for a kettle, for a meal, for the specific room she had already called to confirm. Still, once they are ensconced in their chintzy twin on the first floor (with a view not of the formal gardens as expected, but of the tacky wedding marquee set up in the grounds), Rosalind seems perfectly content to pop a little “helper” from a dainty keepsake pillbox and go to sleep.

It is Julie who lies awake night after night, in the hotel she’s told is full but sure seems otherwise unoccupied, kept up by the creaks and sighs of an old house settling, but also a faint, persistent muffled thumping that might be something more, or nothing at all. (After Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” this is the second time recently that Swinton has played a woman haunted by mysterious noise). “Aren’t we having a lovely time?” murmurs Rosalind cozily. It’s the kind of banal blandishment she often uses to calm her daughter’s “fussing” as the two of them, trapped to an almost comical degree in pragmatic English reserve, exchange halting pleasantries and little acts of care by day, while Julie roams the mazelike corridors and the drizzly grounds of the hotel by night.

In its best moments, including a cracklingly passive-aggressive/affectionate-aggravated birthday dinner, and a couple of exchanges with the hotel’s very “Shining”-esque night porter Bill (Joseph Mydell), there is tremendous insight into the vast and yawning gulf between the conversations we would like to have with our mothers and daughters, and the ones we actually end up having. Sometimes, no matter how resolved you are to reach down into the inexpressibly profound depths of your mutual love, guilt and remorse, all you can ever actually dredge up is some comment about the niceness of the marmalade or prettiness of the gift wrap.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Sept. 5, 2022. Running time: 96 MIN.

Production: (U.K.) An A24, BBC Films presentation of an Element Pictures production in association with JWH Films. (World sales: A24, New York City.) Producers: Ed Guiney, Emma Norton, Andrew Lowe, Joanna Hogg. Co-producer: Eimhear McMahon. Executive producers: Rose Garnett, Martin Scorsese.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Joanna Hogg. Camera: Ed Rutherford. Editor: Helle le Fevre.
With: Tilda Swinton, August Joshi, Carly-Sophia Davis, Joseph Mydell, Crispin Buxton.

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The Eternal Daughter film review — double Tilda Swinton haunts ghostly hotel chiller

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The Eternal Daughter

Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home. Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home. Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home.

Joanna Hogg
Tilda Swinton
August Joshi
59 User reviews
91 Critic reviews
80 Metascore
1 win & 12 nominations

Julie Hart …
Louis the dog

Mini Cab Driver
Hotel receptionist

(uncredited)
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Trivia The Springer Spaniel Louis is in fact Tilda Swinton's dog.
Connections Referenced in Radio Dolin: The 10 Most Anticipated Films of the Year (2022)
Soundtracks Music for strings percussion and celesta Written by Bela Bartok

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Runtime 1 hour 36 minutes
Dolby Digital

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‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Tilda Swinton Shines Twice Over

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. A24 releases the film in theaters on Friday, December 2.

At a critical moment towards the end of Joanna Hogg ’s magnificent “The Souvenir Part II” — the second and supposedly final portion of her self-portrait of an artist — the director’s young avatar is overcome by her frustrations with the student film she’s trying to make (itself an autobiographical story called “The Souvenir”). “I don’t want to see life as it was ,” she stresses, “I want to see life as I imagine it to be .” As played by Honor Swinton Byrne, the hurting but headstrong Julie Hart eventually finds a way to do just that, a breakthrough that allows Hogg’s self-reflexive memoir of a movie to follow suit.

Satisfied that she had committed the ecstatic truth of her own story to celluloid in a way that seemed more honest to her than her memories, Hogg apparently decided to see if she could work the same magic on someone else: Her mother (a version of whom had been portrayed by Honor Swinton Byrne’s mother, Tilda Swinton , in “The Souvenir” and its sequel). More specifically, Hogg wanted to make a movie that would preserve her memories of her mother — if not quite her mother’s memories — by laundering them through her own imagination. As tends to be the case when someone tries to find their way out of a house of mirrors, that seems to have proven easier said than done.

An elegantly slender phantom of a film that channels a spooky hotel’s worth of gothic horror tropes into the heartrending story of a woman trying to see her own ghost, “ The Eternal Daughter ” finds Hogg returning to the haunted corridors of her personal experience — and, unexpectedly, to the fictional version of herself that she invented to walk through them. Yes, Julie Hart is back, with Tilda Swinton taking over the role that her daughter originated in “The Souvenir” (that was set in the ’80s, this in the present day).

But that alone wouldn’t be enough of a meta-casting mind-fuck for this deceptively straightforward movie, in which Hogg interrogates her right and ability to make a movie about her mother by making a movie in which her on-screen avatar interrogates her right and ability to make a movie about her mother. So not only does Swinton play the middle-aged version of Julie, she also reprises her role as Julie’s now-widowed mother, Rosalind, the actress embodying both women as they retreat for a stay at the fictional Moel Famau hotel in Flintshire, Wales.

It’s a worthy conceit for a film that may not quite feel like “The Souvenir Part III” — it’s less a fully fleshed out sequel than a spectral reverse shot — but offers a beautiful coda to Hogg’s masterful couplet all the same (while “The Eternal Daughter” stands on its own, it would likely feel much slighter without some prior familiarity with the story that it so beautifully enriches). Where Hogg’s last two movies saw the filmmaker tracing a version of herself from memory, this one sees her tracing a memory from a version of herself.

Rosalind used to stay at the creaky 300-year-old country house as a child during the war, and she’s returned to it under the auspices of meeting up with a distant cousin. But the truth of the matter is that Julie has an ulterior motive: She plans on asking (telling?) her mother to be the subject of her next film, and possibly gleaning some insight about her character in the process. But the conversation proves hard to broach for several reasons, the first and most immediate of which being that Moel Famau is just the creepiest place this side of a Jack Clayton movie about possessed children.

As if the thick sea of fog weren’t bad enough — the mist obscuring many of the subtle grace notes and devilish little details that allow “The Eternal Daughter” to resonate long after this deceptively small ghost story has come to an end — Julie and Rosalind appear to be the only guests in the sprawling estate. The disinterested young night clerk (Carly Sophia-Davie, all but twirling a piece of gum around her finger) swears that all of the other rooms are booked, but Hogg’s lead characters dine by themselves every night. And whenever the clerk drives off with her unseen boyfriend at the end of each shift, EDM music pounding through the subwoofers of his car, it seems like Julie and Rosalind have been left there all alone. Well, Julie, Rosalind, and Rosalind’s faithful spaniel, Louis (Swinton’s actual dog).

It goes without saying that Moel Famau is the kind of place where things go bump in the night, but in a film that owes far more to Joanna Hogg’s oeuvre than it does any other genre, it stands to reason that they bump rather gently — often strong enough to dislodge an assumption that Julie might have about her mother, but never strong enough to jolt you out of your seat or even try. The fact is that most of “The Eternal Daughter” is spent watching Julie prepare Rosalind’s medicine, sit across from her mother during airless dinner, and shuffle around the hotel’s empty hallways in search of mysterious sounds. She runs into a tiny handful of other characters from time to time, their encounters unfolding like friendly, wistful versions of the conversations that Jack Nicholson has with the bartender in “The Shining” (a connection underscored by Hogg’s use of the same Bela Bartok piece that Kubrick borrowed for his soundtrack, though the two films use different parts of it).

And yet, despite its flagrant lack of incident, “The Eternal Daughter” pulls you in because of how lucidly Julie’s wanderings reflect her mounting creative and personal crises (and, by extension, Hogg’s own). In their almost subliminal way, each of the interactions Julie has with Rosalind unmoors her a little further. Some return her to a state of permanent adolescence — the way that only being around a parent can — while others force her to reckon with how little she knows about her mother, or how little the women of her mother’s generation may even want to be known. When Rosalind shudders that “The rooms hold stories,” it suddenly feels as if Julie is trespassing in them, and the energy percolating inside Ed Rutherford’s lush 16mm frames only adds to that sense of disruption.

More than just an efficient bit of stunt-casting for a movie shot at the height of COVID, Swinton’s uncanny dual performances are key to the movie’s hushed meditation on how women might see themselves in their mothers (this, despite the fact that Swinton so fully inhabits both roles that you almost instantly forget they share a single actress between them). If Julie sometimes feels like her mother’s doppelgänger, then why does Rosalind also seem so distant? Julie becomes quietly fixated on the discrepancies between them, the filmmaker growing frustrated that her efforts to capture her mother’s memory on camera only lead to her getting lost in her own reflection or being confounded by tricks of the light.

Even worse are the rare moments when Julie does manage to see things from her mom’s perspective — or at least convince herself that she can — as she can’t shake the feeling that Rosalind is disappointed by her decision not to become a mother herself. Does Rosalind see that as a form of rejection, and if so, would it be something that Julie (or Hogg) might want to include in a movie that will inevitably come to supplant her actual memories of her mother? And, if it’s true that Julie thinks of her films as her children, what sort of phantasmagorical crossing of the streams might happen if she made one about the woman who gave birth to her?

These questions (in addition to several others) tangle around each other in such delicate fashion over the course of “The Eternal Daughter” that it’s hard to prepare yourself for the moment when Hogg suddenly yanks the movie tight on both sides and knots it all together in a single stroke. The literal meaning of that last-minute twist — obligatory for any film that borrows so much from “The Turn of the Screw” and its ilk — couldn’t be any clearer, but its implications resonate with the same layered complexity of the final shot from “The Souvenir Part II,” and considerably more unease. If Julie’s films really are her children, perhaps dedicating this one to Rosalind would be enough to make her feel like a grandmother at last.

“The Eternal Daughter” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. A24 will release it later this year.

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The Eternal Daughter Reviews

A metafictional work elevated into something new: deeply felt and true as a story about parental enigma, spectral remembrance and ingrained British repression.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2024

The twist may seem inevitable by the time it comes around, but The Eternal Daughter is a skillfully made ghost story which highlights a filmmaker always willing to test herself.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 11, 2023

The Eternal Daughter is anchored by a lovely dual turn from Swinton, who conjures two very distinct characters and effectively portrays the fondness and frustration that exists between them.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2023

[Swinton] is masterful.

Full Review | Dec 2, 2023

I was really moved.

While the film is often infuriatingly ethereal, patient viewers will find it intriguing and deeper than it looks.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 28, 2023

Joanna Hogg treats us to a double dose of Tilda Swinton in this nuanced, atmospheric and gentle ghostly tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 28, 2023

Swinton’s grey-haired old lady routine is a bit much, but there is wit and pathos in the film’s game.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 28, 2023

The dialogue is atrocious, the horror notes farcical and somebody needs to return the smoke machine to Duran Duran.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 28, 2023

Joanna Hogg has made a film that resolves itself backwards: what happens in the final reel recasts what you have just seen completely. It’s something of a departure from her previous films in style, but equally probing and moving.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2023

The Eternal Daughter is hardly designed as a routine tale of the unexpected. It is a story not about spooks, but about sorrow, memory, subtle uncertainties.

Besides a tour de force performance by Swinton, it is a beguiling experience, full of mystique and poignancy. More broadly, it confirms Hogg as one of the most interesting and consistent writer-directors around.

Hogg channels the traditions of mid-20th century British ghost stories by PD James and others into an exploration of the essential unknowability of our parents.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 27, 2023

With an eerie, plaintive woodwind motif in the score and sound design that emphasises every arthritic architectural grumble, Hogg leans into the influence of British supernatural storytelling – it’s two parts Hammer, one part Tales of the Unexpected.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 26, 2023

Hogg gently turns the screws of gothic horror to her advantage here, expertly teasing out the complexities of parent-child relationships and the hold they continue to exert.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 21, 2023

Exasperating, until it becomes heartbreaking [...] it is high-craft filmmaking, but in an indulgent form I found lacking in openness of structure, as it allows too little oxygen for audiences to inhale until its final act.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 20, 2023

The Eternal Daughter is both otherworldly and intently focused on psychological realities. It’s about the way that we all become children again when with our parents, whatever our age.

Full Review | Nov 18, 2023

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.

Full Review | Nov 16, 2023

For receptive audiences, The Eternal Daughter will hit a very strange but significant nerve as a film about that time in our lives when the things that we take for granted are suddenly snatched away.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2023

A Ghostly tale about the spaces we live as a memoir with a brilliant Swinton. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2023

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The eternal daughter review: ghost story makes every choice meaningful.

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For anyone who has already seen the movie, watching The Eternal Daughter trailer is an amusing experience, but prospective viewers shouldn't be fooled — this isn't a horror movie. It is a ghost story, but more in the literary sense. Filmmaker Joanna Hogg continues the work of mining her own life that she did with her Souvenir movies, with Tilda Swinton taking over as Hogg's surrogate, Julie, while also continuing to play Rosalind, Julie's mother. There might be a compelling relationship between this film and the director's previous two, but as this reviewer can attest (having seen only the first part of Hogg's diptych), coming in with that framework is far from necessary. There is a richness to The Eternal Daughter that is all its own. It is a small film, contained in scope and measured in pace, that uses the conceit of haunting to connect with much bigger feelings and ideas. A patient, attentive viewer will find the sum of its carefully placed parts leaves them with more to contemplate than they might have expected.

In an eerie opening that immediately constructs the story's gothic packaging , Julie and Rosalind arrive at their hotel late on a foggy night. The Welsh country manor is beautiful but feels supremely isolated, as if on an island away from the rest of the world, and it looms in the way of the best haunted houses. But the estate seems to Julie the perfect place for a getaway that doubles as birthday present and research trip; she has determined for her mother to be the subject of her next film, and Rosalind spent a lot of time here in her youth, when it belonged to her aunt. But from the moment Julie gets off on the wrong foot with the young, snippy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), things seem off. Strange noises keep her up at night (though Rosalind, who takes a pill before bed, sleeps soundly), and she finds both this creative endeavor and her mother fairly impenetrable. As she investigates the disturbances and excavates the past, however, emotions bubble to the surface that end up being much more than she bargained for.

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Tilda Swinton as Julie holding a birthday cake in The Eternal Daughter

It is difficult to say more about the story without giving too much away, as discovering what there is to discover about The Eternal Daughter is an important part of the experience. The ostensibly simple film proves more slippery than it seemed at first glance, but at 96 minutes and featuring a very small range of characters, it is quite lean. The overall effect is really the product of a handful of artistic choices, and they work best when the audience truly takes them in and considers what they might mean. The ghost story trappings, for instance, invite questions of what a ghost is, and what it can mean to be haunted. Julie and Rosalind are in a place that holds much significance for the latter, triggering in her a constant stream of reminiscences, but it is the former whose experience there borders on the supernatural. Why could that be? Rosalind speaks of the memories she made in the manor being "alive" here - could those same memories, then, be "dead" for Julie? Is trying to reach out and touch the experiences of another, whether as daughter to mother or artist to subject, like piercing the veil?

Then there is the most glaring of The Eternal Daughter 's choices — Swinton's dual role , which sees her predominantly acting against herself. On the one hand, it is a source of great joy just to watch such a talented performer tackle this challenge and make it look like the most natural casting decision in the world. Both characters are so fully physicalized, with movements and mannerisms that express not only age but degree of emotional repression, that it actually becomes hard to remember they were never in the same room together. But, beyond this, Hogg's choice here is incredibly significant. Rosalind and Julie are not just two separate people, but mother and daughter, a relationship that in real life can feature uncanny resemblance. As their physical similarity pushes them together, the audience is encouraged to focus on their differences. There are times, as during an awkward back-and-forth about a cousin's invitation to visit, that they seem in total lockstep, but Rosalind is also closed off in a way that keeps them miles apart. She is, to an extent, unknowable to Julie, and the fact that they look so alike makes the pain Julie feels at this distance much more tangible.

Tilda Swinton as Rosalind sitting in The Eternal Daughter

Crucial here, too, is the narrative's meta nature. In The Eternal Daughter , Julie aims to make a movie about her mother, which is exactly what Hogg has done with this film. Swinton's casting takes on new meaning in this context, and not just because it references The Souvenir and thereby brings this element to the fore. Having the same actor play both daughter/filmmaker and mother/subject, particularly with the agony Julie displays at even approaching this material, comes across as a tacit acknowledgment of the limit of Hogg's perspective.

The best film about her mother she can make ends up being about their relationship, and so heavily refracted through her own prism that the two characters end up shadows of one another. This, perhaps, is one way to understand the title: The role of daughter, despite her efforts, cannot be sublimated into the role of filmmaker. But there are other ways to read it, stemming from other facets of the movie not expounded on here, that are best for viewers to decipher themselves. For those inclined, the process of teasing them out is truly rewarding.

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The Eternal Daughter released in theaters and on demand Friday, December 2. The film is 96 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for some drug material.

The Eternal Daughter

From director Joanna Hogg comes The Eternal Daughter, a drama/mystery film starring Tilda Swinton. Julie and Rosalind (both of which are played by Swinton) arrive at their old family home, now repurposed into a hotel in the Welsh countryside. Looking to use her mother as her next film subject, their old home seems to be the perfect place for Julie to get the inspiration she needs. However, when an encounter with the receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) goes awry, it mysteriously sets off a series of events that dig deeper into their families' past in this seemingly haunted hotel.

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‘The Eternal Daughter’: A Bewitching Ghost Story That Proves Two Tilda Swintons Are Better Than One

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is, among other things, a spiritual sequel to her exquisite recent films The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021). Those movies studied a fledgling filmmaker named Julie Hart, who, bearing some autobiographical resemblance to Hogg herself, wound her way through memories of dating a charismatic, troubled drug addict, attending film school in England in the 1980s, and trying to carve out an artistic identity for herself under the conflicted but supportive eye of her parents and friends. In those movies, Julie was played by Honor Swinton Byrne . The character’s mother was played by the actress’s real-life mother, Tilda Swinton . There was, in other words, already an eerie, poignant echoing at stake in the Souvenir movies, with Byrne loosely playing a version of the director and Swinton standing in for both of their mothers, fictionalized and not.

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The rest, as they say, is noise, eerie sounds that Julie spends much of the movie seeking out, desperate to understand the source — to understand if this place is as haunted as it seems. The drama of The Eternal Daughter is delightfully, purposefully thin. Laying it out won’t tell you much. Julie wanders about, taunted by the old hotel’s ambient commotion. Each day of their stay, she steals away to a room high in the building — the only place with a reliable WiFi signal — to try to get work done on her script. Mother and daughter share meals in a dining room that they have entirely to themselves. They chat every morning and night, bodies swallowed up by the abundant floral patterns papering every surface of their room. Julie asks questions about her mother’s memories of this place. At night, she ritualistically calls her husband while walking her mother’s dog. The dog regularly barks at nothing; one day, eventfully, he escapes their hotel room. Julie befriends the groundskeeper while out looking for the dog. She has brittle interactions with the young receptionist. She spots a ghost in a window, or thinks she does. And then the movie reaches its climax: Her mother’s birthday.

How can a movie that seemingly does so little amount to so much? It’s because of the story lurking beyond it all — the psychological battle being waged, so quietly, under the surface of everything. (Again, in line with the gothic mode.) The thinking seemingly goes that through this project, Julie will keep something of her bond to her mother alive, always. She thinks that through the process of performing this understanding, she will truly come to understand. This is a mother that she’s always tried to please — that she will always, we sense, be trying to please. Hence: the eternal daughter. She will always be the dutiful child. What Hogg’s movie dramatizes is Julie’s labored recognition that, despite her sense of duty, her mother, however loving, will always be just a hair’s breadth out of reach.

It turns out that what Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter has to reveal is not a ghost, per se, but a hard truth, something Julie must learn to reconcile for herself. Hogg’s genius, more apparent in each subsequent chapter of the Souvenir films, is for reminding us that movies are a dream-space, a ghostlike fiction that’s always two steps removed from reality. There’s life, there’s memory, and there’s the movie — a copy of a copy, at best, smudged and imperfect and incredibly rich on its own terms. Her way into this idea isn’t by diving right into fantasy, but instead the opposite. She serves up what feels like reality only to corrode the boundaries between what’s real and not, manipulating time, sound and image until that realism reveals itself to have been manufactured. Look at the impressionistic hop-skip through the events of the first Souvenir movie, like turning the pages of a photo album and dwelling on the memories brought to mind by each image. There, we aren’t watching the playback of an actual mind, but we feel like we are, just as we’re equally aware that we’re only watching a movie, a self-aware imitation of how a mind might work.

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Who better to star in a project like this than an actor whose grasp on reality is just as convincing as her playfully self-aware hand at artifice? A talent for toeing that boundary has been clear since the start of Tilda Swinton’s career, for example in her startling collaborations with figures like Derek Jarman, which remain among her most piercing work. It is not enough to say that she carries this new movie. She is the movie. Through her, the project closes the gap between reality and its other. As both Julie and Rosalind, she could not be more of a pleasure to watch; Julie’s gentle neuroticism, Rosalind’s closed-door inner life — there is much for an actor of this caliber to chew on.

This is no mere parlor trick, however. Makeup and clothing distinguish Julie and her mother, and changes to Swinton’s voice (deeper and breathier and more patient for Rosalind) further set them apart. But what really divides them is the emotional world Swinton has developed for them each. They are not just mother and daughter, but something larger, even archetypal. The mother — loving but withholding, unsentimental but not cold — and the daughter, clawing at the limits of such sturdiness, frustrated and devoted, needy and in the dark. Julie, in particular, speaks to something primal. Some universal need. The Eternal Daughter draws this out of her through a long process of self-deception. Hogg’s style is deceptively simple when it comes to filming scenes of Tilda and Tilda together, leaning back on the basics of shot/reverse shot, one person onscreen and then the other, rather than using digital magic to graft them into the same frame at the same time. In that simplicity, however, lies the whole, bold idea: The division — visual, physical, psychic — between these women, one that Julie feels very much. The Eternal Daughter is about Julie’s attempts to scrape away at that limit, to reach the other side. To reach, in effect, this other part of herself. The film’s genius is in how far Hogg allows her to go. Its poignancy is in the fact that there will always be a limit.

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Review: Tilda Swinton meets Tilda Swinton in ‘The Eternal Daughter,’ a wondrous ghost story

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Tilda Swinton, shapeshifting multitasker extraordinare, may be one of the few living actors who run the risk of seeming lazy if they play only one character per movie. Conniving identical twins, like the ones she played in “Hail, Caesar!” and “Okja,” are a particular specialty of hers. Even showier were the three roles she pulled off in the recent “Suspiria” remake , with the help of some impressive old-age prosthetics. One day, I imagine, Swinton will beat her own personal record from the 2002 science-fiction indie “Teknolust,” in which she played four roles: a scientist and her three cyborg clones.

Until then, there’s “The Eternal Daughter,” a suave and enigmatic haunted-house movie in which Swinton plays two women — a film director, Julie, and her mother, Rosalind — spending a December holiday in the remote Welsh countryside. Their destination is a ramshackle old hotel that, in the opening moments, looms out of the darkness like Manderley or the Overlook or the setting of a ’50s Hammer horror picture. It’s a fabulously evocative setting that opens up to reveal shadowy halls, vertiginous stairwells and hypnotic patterned wallpaper, much of it bathed in a faintly greenish hue that could be the light of an exit sign or something more dreamily sinister. (The production design is by Stéphane Collonge.)

For the record:

5:38 p.m. Nov. 30, 2022 An earlier version of this review said “Teknolust” was released in 1992. It premiered in 2002.

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The English writer-director Joanna Hogg has always excelled at establishing a sense of place, whether it’s the stunning island getaway in her 2010 drama, “Archipelago,” or the painstaking re-creation of her own 1980s London flat in her superb recent diptych of “The Souvenir” (2019) and “The Souvenir Part II” (2021). If you’ve seen either of those, you’ll recognize Swinton’s Rosalind immediately, several years older and with more of a rasp in her voice, though as elegant as ever in dress and manner. You’ll also know that Julie, with her invigorating warmth and stylish dark bob of hair, is a stand-in for Hogg herself, and that this curious, unsettling story is to some degree drawn from real life. But if “The Eternal Daughter” is a sequel of sorts to the “Souvenir” movies, it’s also a more mysterious kind of cinematic memoir.

Foraging once more in her garden of memories, Hogg turns up dark tendrils of suspense and quasi-supernatural portent. She also taps into a vein of dry comedy that resonates all the more within the stillness and solemnity of her impeccably composed images. The hotel, still very much the ramshackle manor it was before postwar refurbishments, groans and shudders under the weight of its many years. The air is chilly, the service chillier, the Wi-Fi nonexistent. Upon her arrival, Julie is greeted by a snippy hotel receptionist (a deliciously passive-aggressive Carly-Sophia Davies) who informs her that the double room she booked months ago isn’t available, never mind that Julie and Rosalind are clearly the hotel’s only guests. Well, them and Rosalind’s faithful dog, Louis (played by one of Swinton’s own spaniels, also named Louis).

But if no one else is staying on the property, how to explain the loud banging noises that disturb Julie’s nightly slumber? Or the unseen intruder who at one point opens the door to her room, allowing Louis to escape? Is it just a trick of the wind, or is something creepier going on? Don’t worry too much about Louis, by the way; Hogg may be having fun with horror conventions, but this isn’t one of those sadistic exercises where the family pet winds up butchered. The spooky gothic atmosphere is doled out with a playful touch. We’re invited to lose ourselves in the mists, the moonlight and the ominous music that accompanies Julie’s walks on the hotel grounds, and to savor the gloom and the grain of Ed Rutherford’s 16-millimeter cinematography.

Swinton’s casting is the movie’s most audacious bit of magic, and also its subtlest. Hogg, working in her usual intimate, unhurried style, shrewdly downplays her own gimmick. She seldom positions Julie and Rosalind in the same shot, instead cutting rhythmically between them mid-conversation. It’s a technique that minimizes the need for body doubles and digital trickery, and a splendid reminder of how much magic a resourceful filmmaker can conjure on a limited budget.

A woman in a black jacket looks out a window

Helle le Fevre’s steady back-and-forth cutting also suits Julie and Rosalind’s conversational rhythms, which smack of what might strike some ears as a quintessentially English reserve. The two are polite, hesitant and reluctant to step on each other’s sentences. They begin most mornings by going over their respective plans: Rosalind will spend the day resting, Julie will head upstairs and try to get some writing done, and they’ll both do their best to avoid the bothersome cousin nearby who’s eager to pay them a visit. But their most revealing and moving conversations unfold in the hushed dining room where they meet in the evening, selecting entrées from a woefully limited menu and dancing delicately around the matters at hand.

There’s a mystery at the heart of this mother-daughter relationship, and “The Eternal Daughter,” despite its trim running time, is slow to surrender its secrets. Suffice to say it has something to do with Rosalind’s last visit to these premises decades earlier, when she was brought here as a child to shelter during the war. Her memories of that period are an unsurprising mix of the idyllic and the traumatic. They are also a source of potential artistic inspiration for Julie, who has brought Rosalind back to this precise spot with more than just a nostalgic holiday in mind.

What right does a storyteller have to draw on someone else’s experience? Hogg didn’t spare Julie that difficult question in “The Souvenir,” and here she again subjects the character — and thus herself — to rigorous critical scrutiny. Julie’s own reservations are apparent in the surreptitious way she switches on her voice recorder when Rosalind starts reminiscing, and also in the guilt she feels whenever her sensitive probing of her mother’s memories strikes a nerve. One way to interpret the movie’s genre trappings — the strange noises, the creeping unease, the pervasive loneliness, the often-indeterminate time of day, the clever use of mirrors to splinter Julie’s own image — is as a manifestation of that guilt. Julie is losing herself in an ethical fog as well as a literal one.

All this might have made “The Eternal Daughter” play like a dubious exercise in self-doubt, an apologia for its own existence. But the movie is much more than that. Hogg has fashioned a deeply moving tribute to her mother, one that hums with wit and glows with affection. And in Swinton’s exquisitely delineated performances, she has hit on something far more profound than a mere stunt. Swinton’s two faces suggest the strange, often-uncomfortable transference of identity that can happen over time between mothers and daughters. They also give rise to the idea that to enter into someone else’s experience is, on some level, to become them, to partake of their flesh and spirit.

This is personal filmmaking as parlor trick, as mesmerizing creative séance. As such, it’s designed to make you question your grip on reality, just as Julie questions hers. Hogg delights in leading us up the garden path, never more literally than when a benevolent groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell) emerges one night to assist Julie, and perhaps Rosalind too. At the same time, the director has more in mind than an elaborate tease, and once the mist clears, as it finally does, the pattern it reveals has a beautiful, shattering clarity.

What seemed to be one kind of tale suddenly reshapes itself, before our eyes, into another. And the air of emotional guardedness reveals, in retrospect, the deep, anguished feeling that has been there all along. “The Eternal Daughter” is haunting, as all the best ghost stories are. The best love stories too.

‘The Eternal Daughter’

Rated: PG-13, for some drug material Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 2 at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The Eternal Daughter Ending, Explained: Was Rosalind Dead All Along?

A24’s ‘ The Eternal Daughter ’ is a gothic mystery that plays on the elements around it while feeding into the relationship between a woman and her mother to deliver a story that deeply unsettles the audience. Instead of resorting to the conventional methods used in a horror story, the film creates an atmosphere that seeps into the mind of the viewer and creates an eeriness that feels closer to home. While it might look like nothing much happens throughout the film, the empty spaces and sparse conversations only add more weight to the revelation at the end. If you are wondering what it means, then we’ve got you covered. SPOILERS AHEAD

The Eternal Daughter Plot Synopsis

Julie Hart, and her mother, Rosalind, arrive at a hotel to spend a weekend together. The hotel used to be Rosalind’s aunt’s estate where she spent time as a child as well as an adult. It is a place full of memories, which start to come back the more time Rosalind spends there. Julie tries to pry these memories out of her mother in an effort to understand her better. She is also working on a film about her and Rosalind, which leads her to confront her own emotions about their relationship.

Things go off to a rocky start at the hotel when a rude receptionist doesn’t give them the room they’d reserved. Moreover, it seems like the entire hotel is empty except for them, and yet, there are noises and creaks that keep Julie awake at night. There is also the mysterious woman at the window that Julie sees every night she takes her dog out for a walk. All these things, combined with the fear that she has inadvertently made her mother unhappy by bringing her to a place connected to her sad memories, take a toll on Julie until eventually, she breaks down.

The Eternal Daughter Ending: Was Rosalind Dead All Along?

There are a lot of questions that come to mind while watching ‘The Eternal Daughter’, but the one that catches the attention of the viewer is the final dinner scene where it is revealed that Julie doesn’t have Rosalind by her side. It is supposed to be a celebratory birthday dinner for Rosalind, but things quickly turn sour when Rosalind says that she is not ready to eat just yet. Feeling weird about eating alone, Julie refuses to eat until her mother orders as well, which leads Julie to spill her feelings about her own mortality and loneliness. Then, the cake arrives, and we find Julie alone at the dinner table.

In the next scene, we find Rosalind and Julie holding hands while Rosalind passes away. This raises a lot of questions. When did Rosalind die? Was it during the weekend, or had she died even before Julie came to spend the weekend at the hotel? If so, then, does that mean that all this time, the Rosalind that we’d been seeing was never there at all? The answer to all these questions is rather simple when broken down to the timeline, but a little more complicated when viewed from the lens of Julie’s emotions.

Here’s the possible order of events. Rosalind and Julie did come to spend a weekend at the hotel together, but that was at least a year before the final scene of the film. It was Rosalind’s birthday and to get to know her better, Julie brought her to what used to be her aunt’s estate, which brought back deeply buried memories for Rosalind. All the conversations that happen between the mother and daughter actually took place, and Julie recorded them for the purpose of writing her film.

Sometime during that weekend, probably around, or after, her birthday, Rosalind died. It is confirmed that she died at the hotel because we see her lying on the same bed and the room looks pretty much the same. For Julie, her mother’s death was a pivotal event for numerous reasons. With her death, both of Julie’s parents were now gone. Because she’d spent the past couple of years completely devoting herself to her mother’s care, their relationship had flipped in some way, making Rosalind the child and Julie the mother. This is something we find Rosalind discussing with Bill one afternoon. Thus, losing Rosalind hit Julie on a much deeper level, because she didn’t have children of her own, which is where the birthday dinner conversation comes into play.

Seeing her mother deteriorate in front of her eyes and finding herself taking care of her, Julie realizes that she will never have what Rosalind does. Over the years, she became so indulged in her career and then with her mother that she never gave time to start a family of her own. Now, seeing her mother die makes her confront her own mortality and how there will be no one to fuss over her when she comes to this state. She feels that time is running out for her and that makes her anxious about her own future.

Another thing that eats at Julie is the feeling that despite spending all this time with her, she never really got to know her mother as well as she could have. She realizes this when her mother tells her about the traumatic memories related to the house. This is where Rosalind was when the news of her brother’s death arrived and also where she had a miscarriage. Julie didn’t know any of that, which makes her wonder what else she didn’t know about her mother. This not only makes her sad but also makes her question the film. Does she have the right to poke around in her mother’s life and dig out old wounds just for the sake of her story?

It is a combination of all these emotions that weighs heavy on Julie when she comes back next year to the hotel, this time alone. Because Rosalind used to live at that house and she died there too, Julie hopes that spending the weekend there will bring her closer to her mother. It is also her mother’s birthday, which makes it an even more emotional few days. However, her intention to find some peace of mind during this time is upturned when she becomes more restless than she’d been before she came there.

This is where the film actually begins but melds the events with the ones that happened while Rosalind was still alive. The fact that the mother and daughter rarely appear in the same frame (probably only thrice during the entire film) also gives us a sense of the distance between them. This could symbolize the detachment of their emotions and their inability to properly converse with one another, even when they love and care for each other very much. This inability to be in the same frame of the film also represents the disconnect between them as a mother and a daughter, and how they are not in the same frame of mind.

It also acts as a huge hint for the audience, who never see Rosalind converse with the receptionist, who is also the waitress. The only time we see Rosalind talk to someone else is when she has a conversation with Bill, which is actually Julie’s memory. This is what keeps us on our toes and sows doubts about Rosalind and whether or not she is real at all. In fact, the film answers that question with the woman in the window, which though faded, looks eerily like Rosalind. Previously, the woman in the window was mentioned by the driver, though it is not confirmed whether he saw Rosalind too. For Julie, in any case, this scene is more than just the haunting of the building. It is the haunting of the mind, as she is constantly thinking about her mother and associates her with the house.

The fact that Julie and Rosalind look and sound like each other also adds another layer to this haunting. Through this, her mother becomes a reflection of herself in the future. Despite being two different people, the similarity of their faces closes the distance between them and the audience starts to wonder whether they are the same person after all. It is also another reminder of Julie’s mortality, the time that she doesn’t have much left. So, in a way, seeing her mother die is like seeing herself die, making the entire affair a little more morbid for her.

Julie comes to the hotel wishing to write the story that she’d intended to start the year she visited the place with her mother. Her return is also a way for her to replay those memories, either through the conversations she’d secretly recorded or through the simple matter of presence. As is said in the film, a house holds a lot of memories, and Julie wishes to relive some of them, to remember her mother as well as to write her story. She becomes so immersed in them that she loses the sense of time, which is what Rosalind says at some point in the film. She says that there is a muddle in her of “when”. The same happens with Julie, as the “then” and “now” get muddled up for her too. Still, there are a few hints to demarcate the past and the present.

The fact that this is the second time that Julie has come here and that she is struggling emotionally is proved by the mellowed behavior of an otherwise perpetually rude and indifferent receptionist. When Julie cries over the cake with her mother’s empty chair in front of her, the receptionist feels bad for her. She knows that Rosalind had died the previous year because she was there too. Similarly, Bill later checking up on Julie also shows that he was there the previous year, though he couldn’t attend the birthday celebration because he had some other matter to attend to. Both Bill and the receptionist know that it is a difficult time for Julie and they express their sympathies to her.

Does Julie Write the Film About Her Mother?

Julie’s intention in visiting the hotel alone was to take another look at her and Rosalind’s relationship. She wanted to write a story about them, but her own emotional struggles were keeping her from writing it. This is also reflected in the weather which is misty throughout the weekend. It’s like a layer over Julie’s own mind, wrapping her so deeply in the grief about her mother’s loss and the regrets she holds that she cannot start working on the story just yet. She’s still finding it, but reaching it means going through her own fears and insecurities and the love as well as the resentment towards her mother.

When she confronts that, she not only has a good night’s sleep but the next morning, the mist disappears and gives way to a bright day. This is when Julie makes headway with her writing. When she leaves, we also see a lot more people, compared to the days that she and her mother had seemingly spent alone in the hotel. This implies that the dark clouds in her mind have subsided and she is leaving the hotel a lot more clearheaded. Hence, it can be assumed that she succeeds in writing and making the film that she always intended to.

Interestingly, the first few lines of her film sound very similar to the beginning of ‘The Eternal Daughter’. With this, the film adds another layer to itself. It could mean that all that we saw up until the last few minutes is actually the film that Julie wrote rather than the events that actually happened to her. In a way, it represents director Joanna Hogg’s own experience of writing and making the film. The director relied on her own relationship with her mother to inform the story of ‘The Eternal Daughter’. The gothic horror element was her way to represent the different facets of her own life. With the story that Julie writes, it all comes full circle, though in a bit meta manner. Still, it ties up Julie’s story pretty nicely and we know that she has found some clarity and closure when it comes to her mother.

Read More: Is The Eternal Daughter Based on a True Story?

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Tilda Swinton stars twice in 'The Eternal Daughter' — as both parent and child

Justin Chang

Tilda Swinton plays two characters, a mother and a daughter, who have gone to spend a winter holiday at a hotel in Wales in the new movie The Eternal Daugher. A24 hide caption

Tilda Swinton plays two characters, a mother and a daughter, who have gone to spend a winter holiday at a hotel in Wales in the new movie The Eternal Daugher.

I have to admit that when I heard Tilda Swinton would be playing two roles in The Eternal Daughter , my immediate reaction was something like, "What else is new?" Swinton is a marvelous actor and a gifted multitasker. Maybe you remember her playing twin sisters in Hail, Caesar! or Okja , or taking on three different roles in the recent remake of Suspiria .

But The Eternal Daughter , the latest movie written and directed by Joanna Hogg, might be the most effective and moving casting stunt of Swinton's career. She plays a filmmaker, Julie, and her mother, Rosalind, who have come to stay at a remote Welsh hotel for a few days before Christmas. They've booked a double room for themselves and Rosalind's dog, Louis, played by one of Swinton's own spaniels. That's about it for the cast, save a few members of the hotel staff, including an amusingly snippy receptionist played by Carly-Sophia Davies. It doesn't appear there are any other guests.

While it unfolds at a measured pace, The Eternal Daughter is immediately gripping. Hogg has structured the movie as a kind of ghost story, and she's clearly having fun with the conventions of the genre. The hotel is a marvelously creaky old estate in the middle of nowhere, shrouded in mists and moonlight. Strange noises disturb Julie's sleep at night, and at one point, someone — it's not clear who — opens the door to their room and Louis gets out. Don't worry, this isn't one of those slasher movies where the family pet winds up dead. Hogg isn't really trying to scare us. But she has a wonderful feel for gothic atmosphere, something she heightens by shooting on 16mm film and playing eerie flute music during Julie's walks on the hotel grounds.

Movie Interviews

Tilda swinton and joanna hogg on 'the souvenir'.

All in all, the movie is a splendid reminder of how much magic a smart, subtle filmmaker can conjure without a massive visual-effects budget. And the most magical thing about it is Swinton's double casting. Hogg shrewdly downplays her own gimmick. She rarely places Julie and Rosalind in the same frame, instead cutting between them during their many conversations. That must have made shooting less expensive, with minimal need for body doubles or digital trickery. The back-and-forth editing style also works well for the script, given that this mother and daughter tend to speak in polite, hesitant tones; rarely do they step on each other's sentences. They clearly love and dote on each other — Julie, full of warmth and vigor, takes good care of Rosalind, who tires easily and isn't in the best of health.

But there's also a darker undertow to their relationship that gradually comes into focus. We learn that Rosalind was sent to stay at this place years ago during World War II, when she was still a child. She has some happy memories of her time here, but also a lot of traumatic ones — and Julie, we realize, wants to mine those memories for a future film project.

Here's where things get complicated, since Julie is an alter ego for Joanna Hogg herself, and Rosalind is a stand-in for her own mother. This isn't the first of Hogg's movies to draw on her family life — I loved her two Souvenir films, about her early years as a student filmmaker in the 1980s. But The Eternal Daughter , set closer to the present day, is a different kind of cinematic memoir — more playful, and more mysterious. In reminiscing about her own relationship with her mother, Hogg raises all kinds of ideas about grief, loss and memory. She's also questioning herself: Does she have any right to probe her mother's personal history for her own artistic inspiration?

I don't know the answer, and I don't know if Hogg does, either. But I'm grateful to have spent time with these two characters and the great actor who plays them. Swinton's casting isn't just a stunt; it brilliantly conveys the uncomfortable transference of identity that often happens between mothers and daughters. At the same time, when they communicate, Julie and Rosalind show a certain reserve, shying away from confrontation or even emotion. But the shattering climax of The Eternal Daughter is nothing if not emotional. It leaves us with the intriguing notion that maybe all love stories are ghost stories, to the degree that we're all haunted, in some way, by the memories of those we love.

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The eternal daughter.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 0 Reviews
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Common Sense Media Review

Unique and eerie ghost story studies grief and memories.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 13+?

Eerie moments and unexplainable visions. There are ghosts, but not in a traditio

Characters drink alcohol fairly frequently. Wine, whiskey, and champagne is drun

Any Positive Content?

There are only four true characters of note, three of them are women and the one

The power of memories and how they can remind us of precious time spent with lov

Julie contends with nostalgia and memories, some painful. She shows humanity as

Violence & Scariness

Eerie moments and unexplainable visions. There are ghosts, but not in a traditional, cinematic sense. An anxious moment when a dog is thought to have gone missing. Reference to a miscarriage.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink alcohol fairly frequently. Wine, whiskey, and champagne is drunk during meal times. An elderly character has prescription drugs.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Diverse Representations

There are only four true characters of note, three of them are women and the one male is a person of color.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Messages

The power of memories and how they can remind us of precious time spent with loved ones. Also the importance and emotional connection places can have and how they too can evoke certain memories -- some of which can be haunting.

Positive Role Models

Julie contends with nostalgia and memories, some painful. She shows humanity as she strives to make sense of her grief and loneliness. The receptionist at the hotel is quite rude and unaccommodating to her new and only guests.

Parents need to know that The Eternal Daughter is an eerie drama with an unsettling tone in what could be described as an unconventional ghost story. Julie ( Tilda Swinton ) visits her old family home -- now a hotel -- with her elderly mother, Rosalind (also played by Swinton) and begins seeing visions she can't quite explain. The feeling of unease extends to a dog briefly going missing. Despite the supernatural elements, it's a very human story. It's primarily about grief, and the impact and significance of memories, be them happy or painful. Julie is lonely, and this concept is also explored. It's also revealed that she once had a miscarriage. The film is led by three female characters and a male person of color. There isn't any swearing of note, but there is frequent alcohol consumption, as Julie and her mother drink wine, champagne, and whiskey when dining together. Rosalind also takes prescription drugs. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER is the story of filmmaker Julie ( Tilda Swinton ) and her elderly mother Rosalind (also played by Swinton) who set off for a short holiday together to their old family home. It has since been converted into a hotel, though while unrecognizable in the most part, the memories of a life they've shared remain within the walls, and they are memories Julie simply can't shake nor make sense of.

Is It Any Good?

This mystery drama marks another collaboration for auteur Joanna Hogg and her long-standing, childhood friend Swinton, fresh off the back of the success of The Souvenir , Parts One and Two . The Eternal Daughter moves away from the naturalistic approach of the preceding endeavors and into a more supernatural place. Yet despite this, the film remains no less human. It's fascinating to see Hogg delve into a genre piece of this nature, and the inspirations from gothic horrors, notably from Hammer Horror, is prevalent -- especially in the striking score.

However, there is something a little cold about this film. While that can be expected in a movie about a mother and daughter who struggle, at times, to fully connect, in a big, vacant hotel -- there is a lack of emotion for us to invest in. Swinton makes this entirely watchable though, bringing such nuance to both of her roles. It's a remarkable feat that the film is mostly conversations between Julie and her mother Rosalind, and Swinton is playing them both. But the film thrives mainly in its mysterious, elusive edge, posing a number of questions, most of which remain unanswered.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether they found The Eternal Daughter scary . How did it differ from other ghost stories you might have seen? What's the appeal of scary movies?

Discuss the relationship between Julie and her mother. How would you describe it?

The film examines grief and how it can affect people. Have you ever lost someone close to you? How did you feel? How to talk to kids about difficult subjects.

Memories are an important theme in the movie. Talk about what memories you have. Are they happy memories, sad, or both?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 2, 2022
On DVD or streaming : December 2, 2022
Cast : Tilda Swinton , Carly-Sophia Davies , Joseph Mydell
Director : Joanna Hogg
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Drama
Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
Run time : 96 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : some drug material
Last updated : January 27, 2023

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The Eternal Daughter Review

For some, going on an isolated holiday with their elderly mother is a literal nightmare. For others, becoming their mother is even worse. Unluckily for the filmmaker protagonist in The Eternal Daughter , each of these scenarios emerges: mother Rosalind and daughter Julie unwittingly rake up painful memories during a trip to a spooky rural hotel, Rosalind’s former family home; not only that, but Tilda Swinton plays them both, in dual roles.

This is the ghoulish set-up of Joanna Hogg’s latest film, another quasi-autobiographical story which follows characters from The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II decades on, forming something of a JCU (Julie Cinematic Universe). Here, Hogg has created a haunted-house film — albeit the most politely strained and British haunted-house film ever — that quite literally opens on an eerily mist-laden country road, with a cabbie telling a ghost story.

With a self-aware wink, Hogg invokes an array of horror-filmmaking stereotypes.

Rosalind and Julie find that this is not the warm, welcoming locale it once was; where it should be cosy and nostalgic, it’s actually cold and aloof, mirroring the very nature of their relationship and how it’s changed. What’s worse, the surly receptionist (scene-stealing newcomer Carly-Sophia Davies) is a far cry from the hospitality Julie was expecting. A constant whistle of wind acts as the white noise in her unsettled mind, with laboured conversations sending half-truths and long-fossilised pain rattling through draughty rooms like a poltergeist.

This pint-sized, lo-fi tale is a feast of atmospheric delights, however. With a self-aware wink, Hogg invokes an array of horror-filmmaking stereotypes to create an intriguingly kitsch atmosphere, including split diopter shots, Dutch angles, crash zooms and a conspicuously creepy score. The most obviously scary thing that happens is when Louis the dog briefly goes missing (a handsome spaniel, second-billed, delightful).

But what’s truly ghoulish is not any real supernatural element — it’s the way in which Julie exploits this supposedly selfless time with her mother for her own benefit. Their trip is a bit of a ruse: she’s secretly recording their exchanges without Rosalind’s knowledge, mining her mother for content for an upcoming screenplay. It is plainly Hogg herself grappling with the deeply personal nature of her films, as well as the psychological toll she bears by spilling out her secrets onto celluloid for the world to see. This vulnerable and painful exercise for Julie/Joanna is perfectly literalised in the one moment where the two Tildas finally share the screen together, cracking open the film’s secret thesis in a moment of heartbreaking clarity.

The Eternal Daughter Review

Plenty of mystery, not much interest.

Eternal Daughter

Something is clearly amiss in The Eternal Daughter , but what else can you expect in a movie starring Tilda Swinton . And per usual, she can’t be pinned down in her double role, this time as both halves of the mother-daughter duo Julie and Rosalind Hart.

If a film that’s all about the inner workings of a maternal relationship featuring a surname like Hart seems more obvious than what we’d expect from a director like Joanna Hogg, rest assured, the filmmaker who broke out with a bang disguised as a whimper in The Souvenir is still all about the details. So much so that the plot feels like an afterthought. Or maybe Hogg feels like history is enough, since Swinton is now taking over as the director’s stand-in for the character established by Hogg and Swinton’s own daughter Honor Swinton Byrne in The Souvenir .

The beginning of The Eternal Daughter reeks of an outright setup for a maternal rendition of The Turn of the Screw , with the large imposing manor in the secluded British countryside wrapped in fog and an appropriately creepy atmosphere. If any of that fails to really register with the Harts, there’s an explanation that isn’t traceable to the usual lack of perception, but by the fact that it’s their former family home.

Now it’s a nearly vacant hotel , and the two have returned for the elderly Rosalind’s birthday with an admirable lack of bitterness on their part. Her daughter Julie, a filmmaker, is concerned about her mother’s state to the point of obsession, endlessly fussing and anxious for her happiness, viewing any sad memories expressed to a failure on her part.

But it’s a convenient way to ignore the unsettling details she notices but nevertheless refuses to see in a splendid bit of dissonance. The history of the place is clearly manifesting as something, but precisely what is the real rub. Once it’s clear that Julie is the only one experiencing it, the plot really thickens.

Or does it? As The Eternal Daughter meanders on, it becomes just clear enough that one person at least is under a grave misunderstanding. But even Hogg’s usual form gets old when the only thing established is atmosphere. At least it gets some deserved appreciation, courtesy of some of the most splendid camera work you’ll ever see.

“Provocation only lasts so long, however, and none of the familial reveals in The Eternal Daughter are particularly interesting.”

Hogg is of the less-is-more filmmaking school of thought, so as her gaze deliberately and leisurely abides and allows us to admire the exquisite frames in The Eternal Daughter , which possess all the taste and care of a Gothic spin on Paddington , the question of what is lingering just outside our reference point is deliciously provoked.

Provocation only lasts so long, however, and none of the familial reveals in The Eternal Daughter are particularly interesting. They are compelling listens, in the way mundane details can be when they’re being delivered by a charismatic presence like Swinton, but they tend to evaporate rather quickly once the moment is over.

The supporting characters in The Eternal Daughter could provide more intriguing support if there was anything to them, but the two she interacts with simply never become engaging enough for the simple reason that Julie’s point of concern is her mother. So William (Joseph Mydell) remains the perfectly patient, helpful employee, and the unnamed receptionist is mostly an Irish accent and great legs in killer heels. It’s left for us to determine if her apparent dislike of Julie is due to her being so British that she actually has a cousin named Alistair.

The emotion is there too, as are the usual questions, such as what we take from our parents, the destructive, destabilizing nature of grief deferred, or whether Julie’s love for her mother will translate to forgiveness for breaking the chain and birthing films rather than children. Their bond is ironically the reason the background triumphs over character: the setting is unnerving, but the duo in question are too loving for any real anxiety on their behalf to be warranted.

It’s why in the end, it’s mostly the fantastically lit wallpaper that makes an impression, not the Harts. Viewers might have some very mundane dreams, but some ghost stories will do that to you.

Final Thoughts

Andrea Thompson is a writer, editor, and film critic who is also the founder and director of the Film Girl Film Festival. She is a member of the Chicago Indie Critics and runs her own site, A Reel Of One's Own, and has written for RogerEbert.com, The Spool, The Mary Sue, Inverse, Wealth of Geeks, and The Chicago Reader. She has no intention of becoming any less obsessed with cinema, comics, or nerdom in general.

This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, CGMagazine may earn a commission. However, please know this does not impact our reviews or opinions in any way. See our ethics statement.

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‘The Eternal Daughter’ TIFF Review – A Gothic Family Drama That Struggles to be Memorable

Joanna Hogg ’s The Eternal Daughter begins like so many Gothic stories before it: a car driving along a foggy backwoods road en route to a nearly deserted mansion. The house in question is actually a hotel – one where Julie ( Tilda Swinton ) and her mother (also Swinton) will be staying for a few days to celebrate the latter’s birthday. The vibe, however, is moody: Julie is told by their cab driver that an old woman’s ghostly face has been seen in the window and when they arrive, the place looks dark and shuttered.

At various points throughout the film, it’s clear that something is amiss. Julie can’t sleep because of a recurring banging sound, there appear to be no other guests, and there’s no wifi signal. Even Julie’s calls to her (never seen) husband drop regularly, suggesting she and mother are almost completely cut off from the outside world.

There are two staff on site: a passive-aggressive front desk clerk ( Carly-Sophia Davies ) and Bill ( Joseph Mydell ) the black groundskeeper who only seems to appear at night. The former is stand-offish and antagonistic: there’s a great deal of awkward and uncomfortable humor in her interactions with Julie over innocuous items like which room is available and the acquisition of an electric kettle. The latter is kind and warm: he helps Julie looks for her mother’s dog Louie when it goes missing in the middle of the night and listens to her when she discusses her struggle to connect emotionally with her mother.

But for the vast majority of the runtime, this is exclusively Swinton’s film. Not only does the talented actress play both leads, but she’s also frequently forced to act by herself. This is because Hogg makes the specific decision to avoid establishing shots of the two women in the same frame, relying almost exclusively on two-shots that feature one character talking, then cutting to the other for their response or reaction.

The result is purposeful because it reinforces the space and the divide between the two women. Julie, a filmmaker preparing to make a film about her mum, is desperate to learn more about her life, but there’s clearly a great deal she doesn’t know. Julie’s mother is fond of reminiscing about her experiences around the hotel, where she stayed at the end of the second world war, but in her desire to keep things light, however, the older woman tends to change the subject rather than talk openly about her troubled past. This vexes Julie, who begins secretly recording her mother, although it clearly pains her because she is extremely empathetic about her mother’s health and mood.

The other effect of Hogg’s shooting style is that we are keenly aware and repeatedly reminded that Swinton is playing both roles, sometimes to the point of distraction. While it makes sense thematically – after all, The Eternal Daughter is a drama with minor genre influences (so no jump scares or bombastic set pieces) – the reliance on two-shots slows the film’s pacing down to glacial levels. When the vast majority of the film is composed of conversation between two characters, the monotonous visual repetition eventually starts to feel static and sluggish.

Exacerbating this feeling is the film’s focus on the mundane daily routines of their stay, which is filled with dog walking, writing or reading, dinner and then bed. Again, this is purposefully done: the days and nights blend together, so that time feels liminal and fluid. How long has it been since they arrived? When is mom’s birthday? Has Julie slept recently?

When every day is the same, the foggy weather outside never changes, and the hotel corridors all look the same, the effect is ghostly and ethereal. Alas, it also feels like one long, repetitive loop…which is frustrating when the events of said loop are so low-key.

While Swinton does a reasonable job with the material, the stilted nature of the mother/daughter relationship doesn’t give her much to do. The Eternal Daughter hints at a suspenseful or surprising revelation in its conclusion, but the truth is predictable and heavily foreshadowed throughout.

Perhaps that’s the point? Maybe Hogg is simply using the film’s genre elements, which instantly evoke not just Gothic Horror, but specifically The Others , as a distraction. There’s an obvious interest in exploring strained familial relations, the power of space to activate memories and the difficulties of being an adult caregiver to a parent. But despite the film’s gentle consideration of these themes, there’s simply not much there.

The film looks good and Tilda is fine, but The Eternal Daughter never feels like more than slight diversion. And that’s not enough to be memorable.

Joe is a TV addict with a background in Film Studies. He co-created TV/Film Fest blog QueerHorrorMovies and writes for Bloody Disgusting, Anatomy of a Scream, That Shelf, The Spool and Grim Magazine. He enjoys graphic novels, dark beer and plays multiple sports (adequately, never exceptionally). While he loves all horror, if given a choice, Joe always opts for slashers and creature features.

‘Milk & Serial’ Filmmakers Preview Their Next Horror Movie ‘Obsession’

The 60-minute found footage horror short Milk & Serial is making huge waves here in the horror community, already approaching half a million views since being uploaded just two weeks ago by the channel That’s a Bad Idea , an up-and-coming comedy duo made up of film-school-pals-turned-collaborators Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson.

The short film was made for just $800 and opted for a direct-to-YouTube release versus a more traditional release with a more traditional distributor, with the channel’s 600,000+ subscribers spreading it far and wide across the internet. Milk & Serial follows in the wake of the duo’s The Chair , a previous horror short that similarly went viral and passed 5 million views.

Needless to say, Barker and Tomlinson know what the hell they’re doing in the horror space. And in a chat with Variety this week, they tease that another horror movie is now in the works.

The title? Obsession .

“It’s horror — completely horror,” Barker teases. “It’s terrifying. It’s going to be insane. This movie is unlike anything I think anyone’s ever seen . It’s so different from Milk & Serial … I’m not in it and it will not be a found footage movie. It’ll be shot more like The Chair .”

Barker notes in the same interview that he “worked on this script for over eight months back and forth,” and he’s partnered with Tea Shop Productions ( 47 Meters Down ) on the project.

Stay tuned for more on Obsession as we learn it.

You can watch Milk & Serial below, which follows a well-known social media comedy team whose lives are thrown into a tailspin following a birthday prank intended for their channel.

Ari Drew raved here on Bloody Disgusting just last week , “ Milk & Serial is an exceptional vehicle for Barker and Tomlinson’s singular talents both in front of and behind the camera. The duo’s passion for horror and gift of twisted DIY storytelling are evident from the film’s opening scene. Despite it’s relatively familiar ‘influencer horror’ setup, Milk & Serial is ultimately a wild ride that delivers in spades, elevated by the duo’s impressive ingenuity and ability to capture a sense of authenticity often difficult to achieve in the found footage horror subgenre.”

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To the Devil . . . a Daughter

Let’s see if I have this straight. First, you start with the mother of a she-devil who has been impregnated by a heretic Satanist. After she gives birth, you sacrifice her, and baptize the child in the mother’s blood. Then you send the child off to a Satanist convent for 18 years, until it’s time for her to come back and be re-baptized with the blood of still another evil spirit, after which she will either rule the world or foreclose the mortgage on St. Paul’s Cathedral, I’m not sure which.

That’s more or less the plot of “To the Devil … a Daughter.” I say “more or less,” not because I arrived late or dozed off, but because that’s what the movie has, more or less of a plot. More, in terms of ambition; less, in terms of achievement. It’s the most over-directed exploitation movie I’ve seen in a long time – it attempts to squeeze in so many subplots and parallel bits of action that finally we’re left scratching our heads and wondering who the characters are. In any event: The Satanist in charge is good old Christopher Lee , a yeoman in these matters, who must have a contract of his own with the devil (hardly a horror film has come out of England in years without Lee drooling somewhere about in the shadows). He plays the heretic Father Michael, who has arranged the whole set-up: sacrifice, baby snatching, indoctrination, incantations, puffs of sulfurous smoke and all that.

His master plan is to retrieve the daughter of Satan ( Nastassja Kinski ) from her hideaway in Germany, re-baptize her and become the power behind her throne. But he’s thwarted by Richard Widmark , who plays a scholarly author of books on demonology. Widmark outsmarts the crafty Lee by getting a permit to examine the forbidden books in the basement of St. Paul’s and then anticipating what Lee’s next steps are going to be. This leads to the movie’s only moment of humor, when, deep in the crypt, the Archbishop finds a bookworm squirming among the banned volumes and concludes that perhaps it’s just as well. But I almost forgot to mention the telephones. There are lots of them, ringing all during the movie, and at first, I thought they were some kind of symbolism: Ma Bell as She-Devil. But, no, this is a British movie, and the Post Office runs the phones over there. The Post Office has been called a lot of things, but . . . and then, I got it. The screenplay has so many characters, and they’re in so many different places, that the only way to keep them halfway straight is for them to be calling each other all the time. There are even several scenes in which the phone rings and no one’s at home. No one of this Earth, anyway.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Anthony Valentine as David
Richard Widmark as John Verney
Honor Blackman as Anna
Nastassja Kinski as Catherine
Christopher Lee as Father Michael

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IMAGES

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Eternal Daughter Movie Review
REVIEW: “The Eternal Daughter” (2022)

COMMENTS

The Eternal Daughter movie review (2022)
In "The Eternal Daughter," Hogg is working, again, in a very personal even auto-biographical mode, although the setting has changed, and the mood has changed. Julie, a middle-aged woman ( Tilda Swinton ) travels with her elderly mother (also Tilda Swinton) to a big country estate, a Downton Abbey or Gosford Park-type place, although considering ...
The Eternal Daughter
Dec 2, 2023 Full Review Victoria Luxford City AM The twist may seem inevitable by the time it comes around, but The Eternal Daughter is a skillfully made ghost story which highlights a filmmaker ...
'The Eternal Daughter' Review: Two Glorious Sides of Tilda Swinton
The Eternal Daughter. NYT Critic's Pick. Directed by Joanna Hogg. Drama, Mystery. PG-13. 1h 36m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we ...
"The Eternal Daughter," Reviewed: A Tour de Force for Tilda Swinton
Richard Brody reviews the haunted-house film "The Eternal Daughter," the third movie in Joanna Hogg's "Souvenir" series, starring Tilda Swinton.
The Eternal Daughter review: a quiet ghost story with a double dose of
The Eternal Daughter is a sparse film. This is most noticeable with the cast: the two characters played by Swinton appear to be the sole tenants in the hotel, and the only other people with ...
'The Eternal Daughter' Review: A Double Dose of Tilda Swinton
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydell, Carly-Sophia Davies, August Joshi, Crispin Buxton. Director/screenwriter: Joanna Hogg. 1 hour 36 minutes. However, while the characters may be familiar, the ...
'The Eternal Daughter' Review: Tilda Swinton Doubles Down
Sandro Kopp, Courtesy of A24. A mysterious nighttime mist swirls through Joanna Hogg 's sorrowful, secluded " The Eternal Daughter .". It is pumped, in artificial, Hammer-horror puffs and ...
The Eternal Daughter film review
The Eternal Daughter film review — double Tilda Swinton haunts ghostly hotel chiller Eerie story — with humour and hound — is an unexpected but welcome departure for British filmmaker Joanna ...
The Eternal Daughter (2022)
The Eternal Daughter: Directed by Joanna Hogg. With Tilda Swinton, Louis, August Joshi, Carly-Sophia Davies. Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home.
The Eternal Daughter
TheJumpCut. Apr 29, 2024. Filmed around the exceptional performance of Tilda Swinton during Covid, 2022's 'The Eternal Daughter' is a modern day ghost story. SYNOPSIS: 'Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home.'. The film is a slow burn.
'The Eternal Daughter' Review: Tilda Swinton Shines Twice Over
Editor's note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. A24 releases the film in theaters on Friday, December 2. At a critical moment towards the end of Joanna Hogg ...
The Eternal Daughter
The Eternal Daughter is hardly designed as a routine tale of the unexpected. It is a story not about spooks, but about sorrow, memory, subtle uncertainties. Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov ...
The Eternal Daughter Review: Ghost Story Makes Every Choice Meaningful
For anyone who has already seen the movie, watching The Eternal Daughter trailer is an amusing experience, but prospective viewers shouldn't be fooled — this isn't a horror movie. It is a ghost story, but more in the literary sense. Filmmaker Joanna Hogg continues the work of mining her own life that she did with her Souvenir movies, with Tilda Swinton taking over as Hogg's surrogate, Julie ...
'The Eternal Daughter' Review: A Spooky Tale of Two Tilda Swintons
Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter is, among other things, a spiritual sequel to her exquisite recent films The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021). Those movies studied a fledgling ...
'Eternal Daughter' review: Tilda Swinton meets Tilda Swinton
Nov. 30, 2022 2:52 PM PT. Tilda Swinton, shapeshifting multitasker extraordinare, may be one of the few living actors who run the risk of seeming lazy if they play only one character per movie ...
The Eternal Daughter
The Eternal Daughter is a 2022 Gothic mystery drama film produced, written and directed by Joanna Hogg.It stars Tilda Swinton in a double role, as both a middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother who are guests at a mysterious hotel. Joseph Mydell and Carly-Sophia Davies are featured in supporting roles.. The Eternal Daughter premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 6 ...
The Eternal Daughter Ending, Explained: Was Rosalind Dead All Along?
A24's 'The Eternal Daughter' is a gothic mystery that plays on the elements around it while feeding into the relationship between a woman and her mother to deliver a story that deeply unsettles the audience. Instead of resorting to the conventional methods used in a horror story, the film creates an atmosphere that seeps into the mind of the viewer and creates an eeriness that feels ...
The Eternal Daughter review: Tilda Swinton stars twice as mother and
The Eternal Daughter review: ... But The Eternal Daughter, the latest movie written and directed by Joanna Hogg, might be the most effective and moving casting stunt of Swinton's career. She plays ...
The Eternal Daughter Movie Review
The Eternal Daughter moves away from the naturalistic approach of the preceding endeavors and into a more supernatural place. Yet despite this, the film remains no less human. It's fascinating to see Hogg delve into a genre piece of this nature, and the inspirations from gothic horrors, notably from Hammer Horror, is prevalent -- especially in ...
The Eternal Daughter Review
Posted: Oct 13, 2022 2:00 pm. Below is an advanced review out of the London Film Festival. The Eternal Daughter does not yet have a release date. Social realism concerning the middle-class has ...
The Eternal Daughter Review
Published on 21 11 2023. For some, going on an isolated holiday with their elderly mother is a literal nightmare. For others, becoming their mother is even worse. Unluckily for the filmmaker ...
The Eternal Daughter Review
The beginning of The Eternal Daughter reeks of an outright setup for a maternal rendition of The Turn of the Screw, with the large imposing manor in the secluded British countryside wrapped in fog ...
'The Eternal Daughter' Review
Movies 'The Eternal Daughter' TIFF Review - A Gothic Family Drama That Struggles to be Memorable. Published. 2 years ago. on. September 12, 2022. By. Joe Lipsett.
To the Devil . . . a Daughter movie review (1976)
His master plan is to retrieve the daughter of Satan (Nastassja Kinski) from her hideaway in Germany, re-baptize her and become the power behind her throne.But he's thwarted by Richard Widmark, who plays a scholarly author of books on demonology.Widmark outsmarts the crafty Lee by getting a permit to examine the forbidden books in the basement of St. Paul's and then anticipating what Lee ...

‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Two Glorious Sides of Tilda Swinton

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