Tilda Swinton in a scene from ‘The Eternal Daughter’ | Photo Credit: A24
Filmmaker Joanna Hogg Wants You To Feel Troubled Inside eternal daughterthird with souvenir series. The film deftly and hauntingly explores themes of trauma and the sorrows of memory through a story about a mother and a daughter (both played by Tilda Swinton); The setting is a secluded old castle-turned-hotel surrounded by fog and woods, and the sounds of howling wind filtering through the cracks of the wood make it even more ominous. But a few minutes into the film, a sense of unease creeps in outside the frame and in the mind of the viewer, because this is a film that takes its time to unfold itself and dwells on everything you are shown. You can’t trust by that, i mean eternal daughter Shows his trump cards but also lies about them. Everything about this movie feels incredible, which would have worked if it had something else to back it up.
Julie takes her mother, Rosalind, on her birthday to an old castle where she later spent most of her life. Julie wants to make a film about her mother’s life, but struggles with whether it would be trespassing. Plus, we also get the sense that her mother is a puzzle she can’t solve, and the complexities of the relationship add more weight to Julie’s shoulders. She is awakened at night by strange noises from an upper-floor window, and spends her nights wandering the dark, deserted stairwells, halls, and courtyards of the hotel. The metaphorical and literal supernatural apparitions she sees add to the tension in the atmosphere.
Eternal Daughter (English)
director: Joanna Hogg
mold: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydel, Carly-Sophia Davis
Order: 96 minutes
Story: A young woman and her mother move into a hotel turned into an old palace where she later spent much of her life. The woman gradually starts experiencing some strange occurrences there at night.
Finding out through this mother and daughter’s stay in this solitude, Shining-esque Hotel, eternal daughter Feels like a lucid dream on a chilly night. From start to finish, everything about it is Old Hollywood style, from the music (‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106: I. Andante Tranquillo’) to the grainy film look. The play begins in the viewer’s mind from the outset, in how Hogg chooses to frame the proceedings – we never see both Julie and Rosalind in the frame at once. With Swinton portraying both characters with distinct strokes, this experiential distance itches on the big screen. The framing method (some frames are even randomly mirrored to create a sort of illusion) is the first of the film’s many attempts to throw clutter onto an otherwise serene experience. These quirks are how the film gets made up in our minds, but some of them — like how the hotel receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davis) hums the aforementioned theme music — come across as petty antics.
The film’s unsettling sense of psychological drama reaches a new height when you begin to notice how it reverses its own effort to get you down. The first time Julie records her mother at the dinner table, completely unaware of Rosalind’s presence by the hotel staff, Bill (a worker at the hotel, played by Joseph Myddell) declines Julie’s dinner invitation. Rejected, and spending her time with Rosalind, every odd scene shows the possibility of a long-drawn-out puzzle being solved, but it doesn’t. It is also a silent dramatic motion picture; It is not the dialogue or the action but its pure audio-visual experience that leaves no scope for drama.
It’s only towards the end that the film makes any effort to spell more than it deserves. Aside from Hogg’s ability to use the hotel to create a sense of tangible physical space, it is Swinton who is most impressive in her dual roles. Thanks to her, we see that even though Julie and Rosalind are often together in the scene and all alone in the frame, there is a sense of tug of war between these similar but distinct characters.
eternal daughterSpiritual sequel to Hogg and Swinton souvenir Films, about a daughter who struggles to understand her mother and her attachment to him, and a filmmaker who doesn’t know if he can make a film about a man he doesn’t fully understand. Knows. It’s just unfortunate that you spend much time peeling back its many layers that sometimes bear no fruit other than experiencing the haunting, destructive nature it purports to be about.
The Eternal Daughter is currently playing in theaters