There’s so much metanarrative on display your brain could break if you think about it too hard. But she doesn’t yet understand how jarring and vivid it is for her mother, who’s returned to her childhood home. Understandably so, she’s trepidatious about the project (“I don’t know if I have a right to do that. Julie, a writer-director stand-in for Hogg, is there to find and write her next movie (“I suppose it will come”), a film she means to make about her and her mother. An annoyed, slow-acting, boyfriend-troubled 20-something (Carly-Sophia Davies) is, per your worst nightmare, the only receptionist with whom their entire stay rests. Ed Rutherford’s cinematography is gritty and shadowed. Rooms blend together in their warm, dim lighting, gothic design, and faint-flowery aesthetics. The exit sign in the hallway splays an eerie green neon glow on the ceiling in perpetuity. The lawn, swimming in dense fog, is like a graveyard missing graves. It seems mildly haunted, inhabited by non-threatening ghosts perhaps. The small hotel-house is draped in a velvety darkness. Such is the nature of parent-child relations and self-discovery. It’s a tonal precursor to a movie so fog-laden it makes Sleepy Hollow look clear-eyed. We open on Rosalind and Julie-the former giving Swinton’s The Souvenir: Part II gray-haired grandma look and the latter mostly looking like herself, a shorter-haired Joanna Hogg-driving through a sea of fog in the dark, pulling into a Welsh bed and breakfast where they’ll stay for the remainder of the film. Or, to boil them into one, an eternal daughter. Where Bong Joon-ho and the Coens employed such technique for twins and Guadagnino and Hershman-Leeson used it for science fiction and horror, Hogg plays it more subtly: mother and daughter. Just shy of Suspiria and Teknolust’s respective triple- and quadruple-Tilda count, The Eternal Daughter uses this device differently than others. In the tradition of Okja and Hail, Caesar!, writer-producer-director Joanna Hogg has gifted the world with two Tildas (Swinton, that is) in one film.
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