“The Eternal Daughter,” a gnomic and tender mystery from the British auteur Joanna Hogg now playing in Boca Raton, is not so much a ghost story as a deconstruction of one. It’s set in a remote gothic castle, the sort of lugubrious, centuries-spanning manse Daphne Du Maurier would have relished. It’s a place blanketed in a forever fog, where the doors creak on their hinges and sounds of unknown provenance bang in the night. Even during the day, it retains its spooky foreboding. How could this Gothic pile not be haunted?
One night, a mother, Rosalind, her daughter, Julie, and Rosalind’s King Charles cavalier are deposited inside. Julie is played by Tilda Swinton, and while it might take a minute to realize this in the curated gloom of Ed Rutherford’s hazy cinematography, Rosalind is also played by Tilda Swinton, in ashen and regal makeup. It’s a remarkable example of double casting for a number of reasons, not all of which are immediately apparent.
The castle is now an historic inn, and the ladies and their pampered pooch are given the last available room on the first floor. For a hotel that is supposedly short on vacancies, Julie and Rosalind appear to have the entire building to themselves, for the only other human that seems to be around is the brusque receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), who doubles as their server in the on-site restaurant.
The place seems to exist out of time, and the ladies are as temporally adrift as the location. For Julie, this in-between-ness is sort of the point: She’s a filmmaker, we learn, and she’s here to write a movie about her parents. It turns out Rosalind lived in this hotel ages ago, and stepping inside its walls has opened up long-buried secrets from her past, not all of them pleasant. Though she feels conflicted about it, Julie stealthily records mom’s reminiscences on her phone as fodder for her project, consent be damned.
If you’re a follower of Joanna Hogg’s work, these characters will be familiar, for “The Eternal Daughter,” which was filmed in secret during the COVID-19 lockdown, revisits characters from Hogg’s acclaimed 2019 feature “The Souvenir” and its 2021 sequel, “The Souvenir Part II.” Both are blind spots for me, so I can only review “The Eternal Daughter” on its merits as a singular, self-contained piece of storytelling.
The movie works as such, but it certainly won’t work for everyone. Anyone expecting a paranormal thriller will leave disappointed, because for all its feigning of the genre’s tropes—eerie sounds in the dead of night, a spectral figure appearing in a misty window—“The Eternal Daughter” doggedly evades their commercial payoffs.
You’ll never feel scared, per se, but if the film works, as it certainly did on me, you’ll be lulled into a wavelength that can accurately be described as haunting. “The Eternal Daughter” is, without a doubt, a low-key, somnambulant movie, but it will reward your close attention. It’s about the memories that can cling to a physical space like dust, and about the rightful ownership of those memories. As artists, do we have free license to exorcise someone else’s past, to rewrite it, to restage it for therapy or entertainment? In a moment of rich clarity, while in conversation with the hotel’s kind and attentive groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell)—a curious figure who seems, tellingly, like a writer’s invention—Julie admits that delving into her mother’s history in this manner “feels like trespassing.”
Is the entire film a trespass of sorts, with the filmmaker Julie a surrogate for Hogg’s own creative exploitation of a turbulent family history? If so, “The Eternal Daughter” is a thornier experiment than it originally seems. Either way, Swinton’s twin performances, acted with a connection that’s even more symbiotic than it initially suggests, reveal oceans of pain and longing roiling beneath the surface of their genteel British reserve. Whether or not Julie gets a film out of her time in this surreal estate, the insight and the healing are worth more than any studio can pay.
“The Eternal Daughter” is playing now at Living Room Theaters at FAU, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Tickets cost $9-$12, with discounted admission on Mondays and Tuesdays. Call 561/549-2600 or visit fau.livingroomtheaters.com.
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