96 min | PG-13 | December 2, 2022 | A24
A successful filmmaker checks into a near-empty country hotel with her elderly mother to celebrate a birthday and finish a film about her. The building was once the family home, and the past refuses to stay buried. Tilda Swinton plays both women, which tells you exactly what this ghost story is haunted by.
Julie Hart is a filmmaker who brings her aging mother Rosalind to a remote Welsh hotel for a birthday. The hotel sits nearly empty, fog presses against the windows, and a single sullen receptionist staffs the front desk. Julie wants to make a film about her mother. She also wants to extract a confession of feeling that her mother will not give. The Eternal Daughter dresses itself as a gothic ghost story, but the haunting is the impossibility of knowing your parent before they are gone.
Tilda Swinton plays Julie and Rosalind both, and the casting is the entire argument of the film. As Julie she is anxious and apologetic, forever managing her mother’s comfort and her own guilt. As Rosalind she is gentler and more guarded, deflecting hard questions with politeness and changing the subject. Swinton never lets the two performances blur into a gimmick. The seams between mother and daughter stay visible, which is the point. Joseph Mydell plays Bill the groundskeeper with a warmth that exposes how starved Julie is for plain human kindness.
Joanna Hogg writes and directs, and she shoots the hotel like a haunted house that turns out to be a memory. The cinematography keeps Swinton’s two characters apart in the frame, cutting between them across tables and doorways so they rarely occupy the same shot cleanly. Hogg leans on the sound design to do the haunting. Wind moans through the corridors, pipes knock, and a dog barks at nothing while the score withholds the resolution the genre promises. Carly-Sophia Davies plays the receptionist with a flat hostility that grounds the supernatural register in something petty and real.
This is a film about the stories we build around the people who made us and the questions we never ask in time. Julie wants her mother to narrate her own pain so the film can hold it. Rosalind keeps that pain to herself, and Hogg respects her refusal. The ghost-story machinery delivers a turn that recasts everything, but the dread was never about a haunting. It is about loving someone you cannot finish understanding.