Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 96 minutes
Release Date: December 2nd, 2022 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Joanna Hogg
Writer(s): Joanna Hogg

We’re here now … and that was then.

I’m a big fan of Joanna Hogg’s films, so I was really looking forward to The Eternal Daughter both because of its connections to her previous two films (The Souvenir and The Souvenir: Part II) by way of its actors and its foray into the supernatural (of sorts). She’s created a haunted house thriller wherein the ghosts arrive within the baggage of the visitors rather than the old mansion-turned-hotel itself.

Julie Hart’s (Tilda Swinton) mother Rosalind (also Swinton) used to stay there often as a child when it was owned by her aunt, so the former thinks it a nice birthday destination for the latter to let those joyous days flood back.

With them, however, are also bad days. This place held both the playful fun of adolescent adventures and the horrors of trauma. Julie didn’t plan on that darkness. She only wanted to give her mother a glimpse into happier times and perhaps use the stories sparked by the memory in a new film she’s writing (Hogg simultaneously delivering its creation and result in a meta play on time).

Finding that despair leaves a mark by ensuring Julie retain her own anguish of discovering those truths and the images of what Rosalind looked like when relating them. It casts a pallor on the entire proceedings wherein Julie cannot sleep or work. The wind, fog, and sounds of “ghosts” keep her trapped in a loop of her own making.

The film looks great and Swinton is great as the doting daughter and increasingly troubled mother whose spiraling demeanor brings with it a reveal that’s less surprising than it is welcome (Hogg casts one actor in two parts to render her compositions as the solution to a technical problem while also solving a narrative one).

Does its discovery warrant ninety-plus minutes of what often feel like repetitive motions confirming what we already know? I sadly lean towards “No.” That’s not to say the messaging and metaphor don’t resonate, though. I simply posit that they still would if pared down to a thirty-minute short since I couldn’t stop checking my watch.

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Tilda Swinton in THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER, courtesy of A24.