The Eternal Daughter (2022) — Tilda Swinton plays mother and daughter in a haunted Welsh hotel

Joanna Hogg’s 2022 film puts Tilda Swinton across the dinner table from herself in a Welsh country hotel that does not quite want them there. It is a horror film by mood rather than mechanism — fog, locked doors, the small dread of asking your mother about her childhood.

There is no chainsaw and no closet jump in The Eternal Daughter. Joanna Hogg’s 2022 feature is a gothic mystery in the chamber-piece sense: two characters, one building, a great deal of unanswered weather. The trick — and it is one Tilda Swinton commits to without making a meal of it — is that those two characters are mother and daughter, both played by Swinton herself, under different wigs and a careful difference of posture.

Julie is a middle-aged filmmaker who has brought her elderly mother Rosalind to a remote Welsh hotel that used to be the family home. Their dog Louis paces. The receptionist, played by Carly-Sophia Davies, seems half-irritated by their presence and entirely uninterested in why they have come. Doors creak open onto empty corridors. Julie wants to write something about her mother’s life and quietly records her over dinner. Rosalind tells her stories, then withholds them, then changes the subject. The hotel — or what happened in it once — keeps applying its own slow pressure.

Hogg made the film as a kind of nightlight to her Souvenir diptych, and the audience knows it: Julie is the same character, now older, still trying to turn her own life into film. A24 handled the US release, opening on 2 December 2022 after a competition premiere at the 79th Venice Film Festival in September. Joseph Mydell, August Joshi and Alfie Sankey-Green round out the very small ensemble.

Ed Rutherford’s camera lingers on door frames and middle-distance fog the way old British ghost stories used to — The Innocents, The Haunting, that lineage. The score is restrained almost to the point of disappearing; the sound design does most of the haunting through wind, distant clatter and the dog. Swinton’s dual performance leans on small physical adjustments rather than prosthetic spectacle, which is why the trick lands without ever announcing itself.

Hogg has never been interested in a clean scare, and this is not a film that resolves with a slam. It is a film about looking after a parent, about wanting to record someone before you lose them, and about how much a building can refuse to forget on your behalf. Whatever its final note turns out to mean for any given viewer, it is the right size for the question it asks.

Tags: a24, Tilda Swinton, gothic horror, Joanna Hogg, The Eternal Daughter