REVIEW: Inverness Film Festival – The Eternal Daughter
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4 stars
The latest in this series of director Joanna Hogg’s films (Souvenir, Souvenir Part II) takes the language of horror films – misty woods, creaky landings, clanking pipes, a shadowy manor house – and uses it to frame the darker, more shadowy places in the relationship of filmmaker Julie Hart and her mother Rosalind.
In its Scottish premiere at Inverness Film Festival [thanks to Joanna Hogg!, film director Paul Macdonald-Taylor mentioned], the film's star Tilda Swinton gives a tour de force performance playing both characters and seems to relish creating the mother and daughter, whose family resemblance is so uncanny (!), but whose lives, ambitions and natures seem so different, though their mother-daughter roles are blurred.
As the film starts, the two – with Rosalind’s dog Louis – are on their way to spend a few days at a hotel where Julie hopes to work on her latest film project and also to celebrate her mother’s birthday with her.
From the spectacularly unwelcoming, offhand receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) on arrival to the unsettling emptiness of the hotel itself, it all looks very promising for a potentially horror-tinged story tapping into the fact Julie’s mother stayed there in her childhood when it was a family home, later her aunt’s.
Revelations do come, and Julie’s increasing almost unhealthy over-eagerness to please her mother adds into the film’s growing sense of dread, though anything too predictable is neatly side-stepped.
A surprise germ of new friendship with Bill (Joseph Mydell), a member of the hotel staff, inspires one of the most revealing conversations of the film as Julie shares some of her own artistic and personal doubts: “I’ve been trying to write a film about my mother and I can’t get started. I think I’m not sure I have a right to do such a thing. It feels like trespassing. It’s difficult for me to think of her being sad. I want her to be happy all the time…”
The misty, chill atmosphere of a Christmas ghost story slowly – perhaps almost too slowly – builds creating a perfect setting for an emotional, raw climax which leaves all the artfully-assembled horror movie furniture a little underused for something more original.
And perhaps the film sees a new canine star born. When Louis – the spaniel who had played an extensive role in the film – came up in the end credits, played by real-life ‘Louis’, he got his own appreciative laugh from the IFF audience.
Continuing to work with Joanna Hogg, Martin Scorsese is the executive producer here. MC
QUOTE:
Julie: Oh Mum, I’m so sorry!
Mum: Nothing’s your fault ... You just have to take it. You can’t regret it because you didn’t have a say in it, that is what life is like. You roll with the punches.
The Eternal Daughter is released on December 2 and it is hoped it will return to Eden Court Cinema.
