The Eternal Daughter

 
Tilda Swinton holds a birthday cake lit with one candle inside an ornate-looking hotel. Overlay: Mediaversity Grade B+
 

The Eternal Daughter uses a complicated mother-daughter relationship as its central mystery.”


Title: The Eternal Daughter (2022)
Director: Joanna Hogg 👩🏼🇬🇧
Writer: Joanna Hogg 👩🏼🇬🇧

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 3.5/5

Enjoying a festival run through Venice, Toronto, and now New York Film Festival, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter transports its viewers into a Gothic tale. We join documentarian Julie (Tilda Swinton) and her mother Rosalind (also played by Swinton) at a remote estate in Wales, where the pairing plans to celebrate the latter’s birthday on the grounds where she grew up during the second world war. 

During their stay, Julie slowly teases out morsels of her mother’s past, one memory at a time. Thus the film progresses through conversations, complete with pregnant pauses and things unsaid. It’s accompanied by sound design that could come straight out of a haunted house—rattling windows, flickering lights, the whole shebang. But depending on your appetite for slow builds (and for Tilda Swinton, who performs admirably but whose double-casting feels a touch self-indulgent), you just may find yourself nodding off to actual dreamland. 

Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Hogg teams up with editor Helle le Fevre again after their work together on The Souvenir movies. Through their lived experience as women, the relationship examined on screen between Julie and Rosalind pulses with depth and a persistent unknowability that comes from any child attempting to understand their parents’ psyche. 

On the surface, their conversations seem mundane: musings on how their dinner tastes or errant anecdotes about the past. But beneath their small talk runs an undercurrent of longing and intense emotion. When Julie’s face contorts into uncontrollable grief at the idea of having let her mother down, or when Rosalind grows frustrated with Julie’s constant “fussing” over her, Hogg accurately captures just how tumultuous and fierce a mother-daughter relationship can be.

Race: 3.25/5

For a slim cast of just six actors, it’s positive to see one the few substantial roles go to Joseph Mydell. The African American stage veteran plays Bill, a man who has worked on the Welsh estate for 30 years. He extends great kindness to Julie but thankfully avoids the trap of feeling like an overly flat character who exists to support a white protagonist. Instead, Hogg’s writing gives him a sense of personhood: We find out that Bill’s wife had passed away just the year prior, and in a small but effective bit of dialogue, Bill turns down an invitation from Julie to join her mother’s birthday celebration due to plans with family. It doesn’t take a lot to humanize even minor characters, and The Eternal Daughter carries it off with elegance.

Bonus for Age: +1.00

At 61 years of age at the time of this review, Swinton continues to dig into exciting roles that stretch the boundaries of what women and actors over 60 are normally given by the film industry.

Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.25/5

This melancholy visual poem uses a complicated relationship between two women as its central mystery. Add to that a simple but thoughtful role for a Black actor, and The Eternal Daughter deftly brings something inclusive to the screen.


Like The Eternal Daughter? Try these other titles featuring spooky manors.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

The Beguiled (2017)

The Haunting of Hill House