The Eter­nal Daugh­ter review – dou­ble your Til­da, dou­ble your pleasure

The Eter­nal Daugh­ter opens on a shot of mist drift­ing across a wood­ed sec­tion of road. A white taxi cab, fog lights on, glides like a ghost out of the mist towards us. The taxi is con­vey­ing two Til­da Swin­tons, but they aren’t dop­pel­gängers: one is mid­dle-aged, the oth­er old­er. Swin­ton is no stranger to explor­ing left-field cast­ing ideas, but this is the first time she has played her own mother.

Joan­na Hogg, the British direc­tor not­ed for her shrewd stud­ies of mid­dle class anx­i­eties, bor­rows tech­niques and motifs from ghost sto­ries for this uncan­ny por­trait of a moth­er-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship, told exclu­sive­ly through time spent at an out of the way hotel. This hotel is well-cho­sen. A sprawl­ing old coun­try pile, it is seem­ing­ly almost desert­ed and appears to be miles from any­where. The wind whis­tles through the trees. A shad­ow looms in the cor­ri­dor. A pale face appears at a win­dow. Every­thing creaks. Mem­o­ries stalk both moth­er and daughter.

Lest this all sound relent­less­ly goth­ic, there is a bit of grit in the oys­ter pro­vid­ed by the hotel’s receptionist/​waitress, a mas­ter­class in bare­ly con­cealed fury and loathing from Car­ly-Sophia Davies, in her first film role. And to be fair to the char­ac­ter, why not be furi­ous? She appears to have been large­ly aban­doned to run the show on her own, nev­er mind the fact that this was prob­a­bly nev­er the job of her dreams.

The intan­gi­bil­i­ty of our dreams is a key con­cept in the wider film: the mid­dle-aged daugh­ter char­ac­ter dreams of an elu­sive con­nec­tion with her moth­er but can’t quite artic­u­late what that would actu­al­ly look or feel like, result­ing in frus­tra­tion. She repeat­ed­ly finds her­self trapped in a qui­et bat­tle with her mother’s instinct to grav­i­tate toward small talk.

Her mother’s own dreams and wants are elu­sive, even in minia­ture: she’s the kind of woman who when asked if she would like dessert, asks if you would like dessert (my mum does this and we’re just about to go on a big moth­er-daugh­ter hol­i­day togeth­er, adding anoth­er lay­er of spook­i­ness and coin­ci­dence to my expe­ri­ence of this film), refus­ing with infu­ri­at­ing mild­ness to make even a minor deci­sion based on her own desires.

The mir­ror-effect cre­at­ed by hav­ing Swin­ton play both the moth­er and the daugh­ter is fur­ther mir­rored by the rela­tion­ship the film has to real life, which is evi­dent­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. The daughter’s pro­fes­sion is film­mak­er, which is the source of the film’s most inter­est­ing unease, hang­ing like a spec­tre over pro­ceed­ings. To what extent, the film­mak­er char­ac­ter won­ders, do I have the right to make a film about any of this? She con­tin­u­al­ly records her con­ver­sa­tions with her moth­er as audio files on her iPhone, and the ques­tion of how con­sen­su­al these record­ings were is left ambiguous.

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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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