Old Yorker

Joanna Hogg (2022)

Joanna Hogg makes clear from the start that The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story.  A car, emerging from fog and heading towards the hotel where the film’s action will take place, is almost wraith-like.  The taxi driver informs the younger of his two passengers that the hotel is haunted:  he tells of an unknown figure that unaccountably appeared in a photograph of himself and his wife taken at the location.  There are fragments of eerie-ethereal music on the soundtrack, as well as creaking noises, which keep the main character, Julie, awake on her first night in the remote hotel, somewhere in the Welsh countryside.  Julie is staying there with her mother, Rosalind, whose dog scratches and whines, as if to get to something just outside the door of their room.

Viewers familiar with Hogg’s work will, also from the start, be sceptical that a haunted house tale dependent on such standard elements is in the offing.  Even if we’ve not read about The Eternal Daughter in advance, those of us with a decent memory for names will recall that the protagonist in Hogg’s previous two films was a Julie and her mother a Rosalind, who owned dogs.  Once it emerges that the new film’s Julie is, like her namesake, a film-maker, we wonder if The Eternal Daughter might be ‘The Souvenir Part III’ in substance if not in name.  In The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021) Tilda Swinton was in the supporting role of Rosalind; her real-life daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, was Julie.  In The Eternal Daughter, Tilda Swinton plays both the mother and the daughter – with masterly economy and emotional precision.

Late-middle-aged Julie means to kill two birds with one stone in taking elderly, recently widowed Rosalind to the hotel.  The place was once a private house, the family home in which Rosalind grew up:  Julie thinks it will be nice for her mother to celebrate her birthday there.  Julie also means to use the time to work on a screenplay based on and exploring her and Rosalind’s relationship.  In the narrative’s early stages, those spooky tropes combine to compelling effect with a naturalism that, because it’s believable, works on the audience’s nerves as much as on Julie’s.  Her first encounter at the hotel is with a remarkably charmless, grudging receptionist (very well played by Carly-Sophia Davies).  Having been as unhelpful as possible, the receptionist leaves the hotel at the earliest opportunity:  Julie watches her get into her boyfriend’s car, which drives off at speed.  Despite what the receptionist tells Julie about the rooms all being booked, there appear to be no other guests with whom to compare notes.  The place’s Mary Celeste quality is unnerving.

Over the course of the following day at the hotel, you may start to think differently about what you’re watching.  The receptionist is also the lone waitress in the deserted dining room:  she’s hardly more obliging than on the previous evening but hotel facilities are evidently not as bad as might be expected from her attitude.  Meals are served and Julie has no complaints about them.  It’s hard for her to get a signal when she tries to phone someone later revealed to be her husband but she is able to work on her screenplay without interruptions or technical problems, despite the receptionist’s warning about the unreliable Wi-Fi.  You begin to wonder whether what Julie is experiencing – and what’s on screen always seems to represent her point of view – is objective reality.  Another member of hotel staff appears, the caretaker Bill (Joseph Mydell) – he’s friendly and helpful, the receptionist’s polar opposite.  When Rosalind’s Springer Spaniel, Louis, dashes out into the night and Julie, distraught, searches for him in vain, it’s Bill who lends a hand, though he doesn’t find the dog.  He doesn’t need to:  when Julie returns to her mother, Louis is sitting on Rosalind’s bed, tail wagging, though it’s not clear how he got back in the hotel room.

The briefly lost dog is an expression, and not the only expression, of Julie’s anxiety.  For her mother’s sake, she desperately wants everything to go right with the stay but she struggles to make that happen from the moment they enter the hotel.  It emerges that some of Rosalind’s youthful memories of the place are painful:  it’s where she suffered a miscarriage and learned of the death of a family member in World War II.  When Julie isn’t in the room with her mother, she seems to hear unsettling remarks about herself from Rosalind, who tells Louis what a ‘fusspot’ Julie is and confides in Bill her regrets that her daughter has never had a child of her own but dotes on Rosalind instead.  Julie’s own conversation with Bill is, however, gravid with implication.  She admits that her screenplay isn’t progressing well:  she says she’s not sure she has the right to write revealingly about her mother.  She tells him that her late father was called Bill, too.  The caretaker is himself recently bereaved:  he tells Julie he’s learning to play the flute, in the hope this will enable a new phase in his and his late wife’s relationship.  This slight suggestion of Orpheus and Eurydice (even if Orpheus’s instrument was a lute!), in conjunction with Julie’s childlessness, reminds us that her bedside reading in the hotel is the 1904 Rudyard Kipling story They – described on the Kipling Society website as ‘a strange haunting story of the limbo of lost children not yet ready to feel at home in Heaven, harking back for a space to the earth and the life they knew there’.

Julie and Rosalind share humorous moments courtesy of the male relative who lives in the area and invites them to lunch, and whom neither wants to see; but the setbacks continue and culminate in Rosalind’s birthday dinner, which Julie has designed as the high point of their stay.  Her mother stumbles as she enters the dining room.  She opens presents from her daughter but she doesn’t feel like eating.  Julie, in distress, tells her mother she can’t be happy unless Rosalind is happy too.  She hisses at the receptionist-waitress to bring in Rosalind’s birthday cake but not to light the candle, which Julie herself will do.  When it appears with the candle already lit, Julie grabs the cake and approaches the dining room table, singing ‘Happy birthday to you’.  Her mother’s chair on the opposite side of the table is now empty.

The Eternal Daughter, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022, was also part of the London Film Festival programme last year:  it was on my short list of films to see there but not one of my final choices.  Catching up with it more than a year later, Hogg’s piece now seems to have things in common with a more recent sophisticated ghost story and one of LFF 2023’s offerings – Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers.  Haigh’s film also focuses on a screenwriter trying to write a script about his family past; involves scenes between him and his parents, who are dead but very present in his regretful memories.  Julie’s mother’s vanishing is The Eternal Daughter‘s big reveal and not much happens subsequently – although Tilda Swinton’s deathbed Rosalind is a potent image.  As Julie prepares to leave the hotel, it’s suddenly swarming with guests.  The receptionist voices kindly concern about Julie’s mental health before Bill sees her into her taxi.  It’s a clear day – no sign of fog – as the taxi drives away.  Joanna Hogg’s themes – the creative moral dilemma of a writer mining their own past and the past of those close to them, the persistence of people we’ve loved and lost – finally seem less than original.  But The Eternal Daughter makes satisfying sense in retrospect and it’s beautifully made and played.

10 December 2023