The Eternal Daughter (Headliners)

Rating:

Key Cast: Tilda Swinton
Director: Joanna Hogg
Producer: Andrew Lowe, Ed Guiney, Emma Norton, Joanna Hogg
Screenwriter: Joanna Hogg
Cinematographer: Ed Rutherford

Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton star in Joanna Hogg’s Gothic coda to her two Souvenir films, executive-produced by Martin Scorsese.

In Hogg’s semi-autobiographical The Souvenir (MIFF 2019), Swinton starred opposite her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne, the real-life mother–daughter duo playing an onscreen mother–daughter duo. Here, Swinton reprises her role as matriarch Rosalind and steps in to play a now-middle-aged Julie. The two have travelled to Wales to stay in the family’s wartime country home, which has since become a fog-shrouded hotel haunted by memories. Julie plans to work on her latest film, of which Rosalind is the unwitting subject, but the house’s long-buried secrets have other plans.

In her dual roles, Swinton is characteristically brilliant: you forget you’re not watching two actors. (The performances are even more impressive for being largely improvised!) Trading the aching realism of The Souvenir and its sequel for something much more menacing – there are intertextual nods to everything from The Turn of the Screw to The Shining to Vertigo – Hogg nevertheless continues to mine her own life for material, spinning it into cinematic gold that occupies a genre unique to its creator. The Eternal Daughter is a masterwork from a director at the top of her game and her eternally captivating muse.

“What Hogg accomplishes here – an acutely emotional parable – is something to truly cherish. The Eternal Daughter, sincere yet artful, is quite surprisingly the most relatable movie of the season.” – The A.V. Club