Film Review: Tilda Swinton excels in The Eternal Daughter

The Eternal Daughter (12A) stars Tilda Swinton as Julie Hart, a middle-aged filmmaker treating her widowed mother, Rosalind (also played by Swinton), to a break at a remote country hotel where Rosalind used to stay as a child.

With Christmas just around the corner, it seems odd that Julie and Rosalind appear to be the only guests, and a growing sense of unease intensifies when Julie begins to catch glimpses of a grey, shadowy woman peering at her when she walks her dog late at night.

Is the hotel haunted? Is it Julie herself who is haunted? Or is her imagination simply overstimulated by her attempt to write a film about her strained relationship with her mother?

Written and directed by Joanna Hogg ( The Souvenir), The Eternal Daughter is a slow-burning psychological meditation on love, life and filial devotion, albeit one that is very English in the way the two women politely skirt any conversational topic that might cause the other even a hint of distress.

Tilda Swinton is excellent in both roles here, as the neurotically anxious to please, dutiful daughter Julie, and slightly withdrawn as the world-weary mother. The result is a quiet elegy for an imagined relationship that never really existed, and a heartfelt paean to “the practical magic of love”.