Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir was a semi-autobiographical film that received general plaudits from critics but was also notable for its casting of Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honora Swinton-Byrne as mother and daughter in the film, with the latter serving as Julie, Joanna’s stand-in. That film led to a sequel last year, and now a connected film, The Eternal Daughter, that features the same two characters but isn’t a direct sequel or continuation of any sort. The artifice this time is that Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and her mother, Rosalind, as we’re about 30-35 years on, and the two women head off for a week’s stay at quite possibly the worst bed & breakfast in Wales – which happens to be in their former family home. (You can rent The Eternal Daughter on Amazon, iTunes, and so forth.)
Julie is hoping to make a movie about her mother’s life, and has taken her mother on this trip to try to entice her mum to tell her more of her story and, as we learn over the course of the film, to better understand her mother, who has always been just inscrutable enough that Julie feels insufficient to the task of summarizing her on film. The hotel is something out of a classic horror film, dark, empty save for the world’s least-helpful clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies, who is superb) and later one other staff member (Joseph Mydell), and constantly surrounded by mist and fog. Julie, Rosalind, and Rosalind’s dog Louis (played by Louis, Swinton’s dog) are alone everywhere, in their room, the dining room, on the grounds, anywhere they go. There’s an air of mystery from the air itself, and the constant darkness. The hotel seems to have weird sounds, and Julie even thinks she sees the visage of an old woman in a particular window on the first floor. The answer to everything does appear near the end of the film, although the mystery isn’t the real point here; it’s about a mother and daughter, and how we can never truly know our parents no matter how close we try to get to them.
Swinton has become so known for playing weird characters – and doing so in weird fashion – that a bravura performance like this might just go unappreciated and even unnoticed. If you take GoldDerby’s Oscar odds seriously, she’s at 100 to 1 to win Best Actress, the lowest probability they assign to anyone who has better than a zero chance of winning, although they only gave seven actresses higher odds in that category. (Also at 100:1 is Ana de Armas, who was considered a likely nominee before Blonde bombed.) This is two performances, of course, and the roles required some improvisation, as Hogg typically does not provide word-for-word scripts to her actors, but provides treatments and works with them as director to see where the dialogue goes. There are several obvious reasons to cast Swinton in both roles, from the physical similarities we expect from a mother and a daughter to the fact that this was filmed early in 2021 when a small cast was probably a greater asset for COVID mitigation, but perhaps the best reason is that she’s an amazing actor and very much rises to this occasion. There’s one scene where she seems to pour it on a little thick, but after the film’s reveal at the end, her emotions in that one conversation are easier to understand.
The twist, or mystery, is not that hard to discern; my wife called it within five minutes, and of course we spent most of the film looking for clues to verify or debunk it, but she was right. It’s something we’ve seen before, although I won’t spoil it by citing other films that have used this conceit, but I will defend the choice again by saying it’s beside the point. When you find out what’s been happening, it provides context to everything that’s come before. It’s not a “did you figure it out?” mystery, and there are no jump scares or shocks here; any review calling this a horror movie, in any sense at all, has completely missed Hogg’s intentions. The gimmick exists so Hogg and Swinton can further elucidate the difficulties we face as adult children who are trying to understand our parents better before it is too late to do so. The fog and mist are fairly obvious metaphors for that last part – we simply cannot see our parents clearly because we haven’t lived their lives, or even seen the first portions of their lives, and have then spent much of our lives looking at them not as people, but as parents.
There are only seven credited actors in The Eternal Daughter, including Louis, since the hotel appears to have no other guests – I can’t imagine why not, as it’s dank, noisy, and the one full-time employee seems to hate her job. Davies is pretty fantastic as that clerk, and waitress, and almost everything else, as she isn’t so much mean as apathetic. Your concerns are not her concerns, and since there’s no one else there like a supervisor, she doesn’t have to worry about whether you ever get that kettle you asked for. Mydell plays Bill, who seems to work there sometimes in a sort of catchall porter/groundskeeper post; it’s a dicey role, as it veers close to the Magical Negro trope, since his main function here is to help and comfort Julie, with just a slight backstory of his own. I think the counterargument here is that his race is immaterial to his character, and there isn’t a good way to give him anything more to do in a script that is about 90% Julie and Rosalind. I have another possible explanation for this, but that would require spoiling something in the story to explain.
I find it incredibly impressive just how deep The Eternal Daughter is despite the sparse cast and single setting, a testament to what good writing can do and in many ways a nod to the movies’ roots on the stage, where words were almost all that mattered because you didn’t have huge casts, sets, or special effects to paper over flaws in the script. This exploration of filial ties felt especially poignant to myself and my wife, as our parents are all alive but getting older, and this desire to hold on to what you can because you can’t hold on to what you desire is something that crosses boundaries of race, class, and so on. The bond between a mother and daughter, and the strain that can coexist with it, is something I know I can’t understand, but I hope I can at least appreciate how Hogg has brought it to life on film. It’s a shame that The Eternal Daughter has been so overlooked, between Swinton’s excellent and – gasp! – understated twin performances and the themes that power the story.