The Eternal Daughter [2022] – ★★1/2

“A good story can save poor [visuals], whereas good visuals cannot save a poor story.” That is what Japanese master animator Osamu Tezuka once said, and no matter how different the style of Joanna Hogg’s film is from any animation, this quote is equally applicable here. The Eternal Daughter is a story about middle-aged filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton) who, together with her elderly mother Rosalind (also Swinton), decides to stay for some time in one secluded hotel, a place which Rosalind knows only too well since it was once her family home. There, despite the fact that their arrogant concierge (Carly-Sophia Davies) treats them rather coldly, Julie thinks she can still work on her new film. However, she grows increasingly restless as she attempts to get to the bottom of her mother’s attachment to the house, their shared past and their relationship. This beautifully produced film of much style and nuance is also, unfortunately, not only a banal, pretentious tedium, but also the triumph of “style-over-substance”.

Double-roles are always curious beasts in the world of cinema, and such films about twins spring to mind as The Dark Mirror (1946), A Stolen Life (1946), and Dead Ringer (1964), not to mention Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) or Wallace’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1998). In these roles, the challenge for an actor is often to emphasise the differences in the personalities between twins, and if any actor can take on this challenge and perform it brilliantly, it must be someone at least of the stature of Tilda Swinton. In The Eternal Daughter, her task is not even that tricky as she plays not some twins, but a mother and a daughter, and unfortunately, this, apart from the haunting production design, is the film’s sole attraction – Swinton’s impressive turn as both Julie and Rosalind Hart, showcasing their strange relationship.

The truth is – nothing else seems to work. Hogg’s story tries to draw on the elusiveness of memory, nostalgia for the past, and irreconcilable differences between a mother and a daughter, while also throwing in there ghostly apparitions and, what looks like, a haunted house-concept. None of these features work. They become convincing neither as stand-alone elements nor parts of one coherent vision. The Eternal Daughter gives the vibes of such highly stylish, but also messy and confused-as-to-their-purpose films as The Little Stranger (2018) (which also focuses on the disturbing aspects of one mansion) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020).

The film’s pretences as to it being a mystery is also what lets it down. Julie, being a filmmaker (obviously), is trying to discover a secret, which is actually an un-secret, of her so very English and proper mother and of their previous residence-now-turned-into-a-hotel, which Hogg undoubtedly also wants to present as some relative of Overlook Hotel from The Shining (1980). The main character is certainly “on a journey” to find out something and does attempt to write her film script about it, but it is still unclear whether that quest involves primarily her relationship with her mother and her inability to let go of the past or the house’s illustrative history and their family’s attachment to it. Is there a message somewhere there about modernity or modernisation being the cause of disappearing natural feelings and habits, human touch and that special something? The film’s references to Kipling’s short story They certainly leave that impression, but the director is again too engrossed in her spooky effects, disappearances and mundane dialogues to focus on that thought-provoking theme. The film’s trying twist, that vividly reminds of a number of other, better films, only adds to this mounting number of pretences.

Since a quote started this review, it is only fitting that a quote should end it. Frank Capra famously said: “There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.” Joanna Hogg produced something very tedious here – a “much ado about nothing” plot which is not a ghost mystery exactly, but neither is it anything else. The main character is as pitiful as her unfolding story is dull. Despite The Eternal Daughter’s cosy intimacy of a play and Swinton’s efforts, the film’s numerous artificialities are just too hard to overlook.