Venice Review: Tilda Swinton In Joanna Hogg’s ‘The Eternal Daughter’
06.09.2022 - 18:21
/ deadline.com
The phrase “Joanna Hogg’s Shutter Island” is not a line that many critics expect to bust out in their lifetimes, but with her sixth feature the British director has made a fascinating foray into genre cinema that, while firmly in keeping with the rest of her quasi-autobiographical works, makes a surprising departure from the upper-middle-class realism of her signature film The Souvenir.
Venice competition entry The Eternal Daughter stays very much in the same social milieu, and reunites Hogg with Tilda Swinton in a dual role, but there is also a tremendous sense of unease here, whether one sees it as a spooky story about a woman’s search for self or what it’s like to book a staycation in the UK these days.
Swinton plays Julie, a filmmaker who is taking her mother Rosalind (also Swinton) on a birthday trip to an ancestral home, which is now a hotel. Julie has two aims in mind, one is to share some time with her now-widowed mother before it’s too late, but she is also working on a movie project about her mother’s life, which she soon discovers will involve raking up some painful secrets. Unlike The Souvenir movies, however, which covered similar territory, The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story, wreathed in fog and evoking, very effectively, the specter of M.R. James and his existential chillers.
To Hogg’s credit, this conceit is adhered to and not abandoned. As they arrive at the hotel, mother and daughter hear the taxi driver’s tale of an eerie face that once appeared at the window there, and Julie’s first night is disrupted by weird sounds that apparently only she can hear.
Julie’s mother’s dog Louis — presumably one of the actress’ own stellar pack, which featured heavily in The Souvenir Part II — begins to act