Two Til­da Swin­tons enter Johan­na Hogg’s haunt­ed house in the Eter­nal Daugh­ter trailer

A cou­ple years ago, some­what lost in the shuf­fle as the enter­tain­ment indus­try reor­ga­nized itself around dig­i­tal releas­ing dur­ing the first months of the pan­dem­ic, Sean Durkin​‘s film The Nest offered a curi­ous inflec­tion on the hor­ror film. The sto­ry of a dete­ri­o­rat­ing fam­i­ly took place in a cav­ernous Eng­lish coun­try man­sion rich in men­ac­ing atmos­phere, like a haunt­ed house pic­ture in which the ghosts are strict­ly metaphor­i­cal, the regrets of the past every bit as omi­nous as any phantom.

It was a clever and unset­tling tack, its effi­ca­cy now re-proven by Johan­na Hogg​‘s lat­est film The Eter­nal Daugh­ter, which like­wise places a fraught famil­ial dra­ma in a hand­some manor cours­ing with an ambi­ent malev­o­lent ener­gy bor­der­ing on the super­nat­ur­al. In the first trail­er released today, dis­trib­u­tor A24 sells it as a sort of non-hor­ror movie, all eerie vibes with none of the messy bloodletting.

Though the grab­bier focal point may be Til­da Swin­ton​‘s dou­ble per­for­mance in the lead role, occu­py­ing almost the entire­ty of a film peo­pled by a scant num­ber of addi­tion­al char­ac­ters. She plays the Julie char­ac­ter intro­duced as a Hogg stand-in for her Sou­venir dip­tych of qua­si-mem­oir films, now an adult woman with a career in place, as well as Julie’s fussy aging moth­er Ros­alind. Dur­ing what’s sup­posed to be a leisure out­ing to this beau­ti­ful locale, resent­ments and unful­filled hopes bub­ble to the sur­face like so many specters, adding a Ver­ti­go-ish air (rein­forced by all the radioac­tive-look­ing green light) to their exca­va­tion of old feelings.

In her first-look review from the world pre­mière at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, our crit­ic on the scene Cather­ine Bray was impressed with Hogg’s resource­ful meth­ods, writ­ing: ​“The abil­i­ty to effec­tive­ly trap dig­i­tal ghosts in our devices, as part of a long­ing to pre­serve some sense of con­nec­tion, sits at the fore­most fron­tier of mod­ern anx­i­eties about death and what we leave behind, while the dou­ble cast­ing of Swin­ton under­lines the fact that hav­ing chil­dren used to be the only way that we could leave behind par­tial copies of our­selves. There are as many poten­tial ways to approach a par­ent-child rela­tion­ship onscreen as there are par­ent-child rela­tion­ships on the plan­et, but Hogg may have just dis­cov­ered a new one.”

Hogg spent her two pre­vi­ous films in a state of unspar­ing intro­spec­tion, break­ing down the naïveté and priv­i­lege enjoyed by her younger self, but the direc­tor has opened her inquiries up with her lat­est work, focused now on how she fits into a longer con­tin­u­um of yearn­ing that stretch­es through gen­er­a­tions. For view­ers in the States this Decem­ber, it’s the per­fect win­ter­time watch, cozy in its luxe-hol­i­day set­ting and frosty in its emo­tion­al outlay.

The Eter­nal Daugh­ter comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 2 Decem­ber. A date for the UK has yet to be set.