Criticism of ‘The eternal daughter’, Tilda Swinton and the specters of the past, present and future

In her sixth feature film, Joanna Hogg offers us an intimate and experimental variant of gothic cinema, the genre that turned the domestic space into a sounding board for women’s fear. An elderly mother and her daughter Julie, both played by Tilda Swinton, stay for a weekend at the mother’s old family residence, now a hotel. Julie has organized the stay to treasure the memory of a few days of happiness shared with her mother, before it is too late. The film takes place in a single location, a typically British mansion as beautiful as it is haunting. Since his arrival, a series of small details disturb the environment: unexpected noises, a hostile receptionist in the form of a millennial little request, the lack of telephone coverage, that small adjacent cemetery, the ghost that appears in the window, the possible perspective of an unreliable narrator… With her usual elegance, the British director handles the elements typical of Gothic fiction from a masterful self-awareness that is not devoid of irony. Beneath Hogg’s exquisite taste lies a sense of humor that isn’t always appreciated at first.

‘The eternal daughter’ works both as a ghost story and as a laboratory to crystallize a story about the complexity of the mother-child bond. In this gothic camera drama, the use of the reverse shot solves a priori the appearance of the same actress unfolded in two different roles. But it also reflects the difficulties of a mother and a daughter to converge in a shared memory experience. If classic gothic cinema captured female anguish before marriage, ‘La hija eterna’ captures the fear of losing the maternal connection when, in addition, one does not have one’s own offspring. Joanna Hogg relapses into reflecting the female experience as alterity and strangeness. He also turns his new film into an unexpected complement to the diptych of ‘The Souvenir’ in which cinema finally becomes the possible space for a last reconciliation.

To reconcile ourselves with the specters of the past, present and future

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DATA SHEET

Address: Joanna Hogg Distribution: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydell, Carly-Sophia Davies, August Joshi, Zinnia Davies-Cooke Country: United Kingdom Year: 2022 Release date: 12–5-2023 Gender: Drama Script: Joanna Hogg Duration: 96 min.

Synopsis: A woman and her elderly mother must confront long-buried secrets when they return to their old family home, a grand old mansion that has been turned into a nearly empty hotel steeped in mystery.