Venice Review: Tilda Swinton In Joanna Hogg’s ‘The Eternal Daughter’
deadline.comThe phrase “Joanna Hogg’s Shutter Island” is not a line that many critics expect to bust out in their lifetimes, but with her sixth feature the British director has made a fascinating foray into genre cinema that, while firmly in keeping with the rest of her quasi-autobiographical works, makes a surprising departure from the upper-middle-class realism of her signature film The Souvenir.
Venice competition entry The Eternal Daughter stays very much in the same social milieu, and reunites Hogg with Tilda Swinton in a dual role, but there is also a tremendous sense of unease here, whether one sees it as a spooky story about a woman’s search for self or what it’s like to book a staycation in the UK these days.Swinton plays Julie, a filmmaker who is taking her mother Rosalind (also Swinton) on a birthday trip to an ancestral home, which is now a hotel.
Julie has two aims in mind, one is to share some time with her now-widowed mother before it’s too late, but she is also working on a movie project about her mother’s life, which she soon discovers will involve raking up some painful secrets.
Unlike The Souvenir movies, however, which covered similar territory, The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story, wreathed in fog and evoking, very effectively, the specter of M.R.
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