A mysterious night mist spreads across ‘The Immortal Daughter’ titled sad and lonely Joanna Hogg. It is pumped, in puffs and plumes of artificial hammer terror, through orchards and cobbled driveways. They wrap around gargoyles-covered gables, snags on hedges, and rub against darkened, staring, and possibly haunted windows. It encapsulates the film in the way that unspoken words, undefined guilt, and unfulfilled duties that exist between every mother and daughter can obscure the reality of their fraught, primal relationship. And that’s the idea most relevant to this dangerous movie, in that it’s beautiful and moody but steamy: try to hold it with your hand only closing in the faint, damp cold.
Director Julie (Tilda Swinton), her elderly mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) and Rosalind’s dog Lewis (Tilda Swinton’s dog) arrive in a white taxi on a foggy night at the remote Wells Hotel that Julie has booked for a stay for Rosalind’s birthday in December. One of the secrets guarded by the palace’s peculiar Gothic facade is that it was not always a hotel. It belonged to Jocelyn, Rosalind’s aunt, and as a child during the war, Rosalind stayed here. So there’s emotion toward Julie’s choice of venue, as well as a very disingenuous agenda, which she references every time she surreptitiously records a record on her phone as Rosalind begins to remember: Julie is receiving material for an upcoming project about her and her mother, though she finds it hard to get started.
Like “The Souvenir,” Hogg’s brilliant two-part meta-text memoir, “The Eternal Daughter” is as much about the artist’s fickle relationship with her own creativity — and her struggle with the ethics of choosing stories that don’t necessarily belong to her — as in any personal relationship. And so her old friend and collaborator Swinton, who actually played Julie’s mother Rosalind, is cast against to her Our daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne in the “Souvenir” films, as mother and daughter here, is a logical if slightly tense move.
However, its power is arguably diminished by the slightly spoiled formality of DP Ed Rutherford’s cinematography, who never “cheats” and never uses the trick to show mother and daughter occupying the same frame. While it fits the film’s core themes of mother-daughter exclusion, doubling, imitation and reflection, Rosalind and Julie’s conversations unfold in separate, middle shots in which one’s shadow does not fall on the other, also alerting us from the start to the nature of the story’s construction.
If Hogg were to present her movie as a straightforward drama, it would be a cunning, and possibly overwhelming, decision. But given the outright horror and references to haunted house movies throughout – Giallo’s dark corners; Rage strings from Bartok’s “String Music, Percussion and Celesta”, also extracted for “The Shining”; A separate diopter shot straight out of Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents”, etc. – the movie comes loaded with expectations of the kind he doesn’t particularly care about fulfilling, and soon starts to feel like an unnecessarily long wait for the reveal he knows is coming from the start. Swinton’s double acting, who has been predictably excellent in both roles, is certainly key to “The Immortal Daughter,” but whether he’ll release the film or shut it away too is debatable.
Julie goes wrong with the hostile, spoiled hotel receptionist (a gorgeous, darkly funny screen appearance of Carly’s Sophia Davis), a young woman who apparently didn’t care much about Julie’s perfectly reasonable requests – for a kettle, for a meal, for the specific room she I already called her to confirm. However, as soon as they are seated in their ornate twins on the first floor (with a view not of the formal gardens as expected, but of the tacky wedding marquee set up in the grounds), Rosalind seems quite satisfied with the appearance of a little “helper” from the pill case A delicious souvenir and go to sleep.
It is Julie who lies awake night after night, in the hotel which she has been told is full, but surely seems unoccupied otherwise, kept awake by the creaks and sighs of an old house, but also a faint and constant noise that may be something more, or nothing Absolutely. (After Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, this was the second time Swinton had played a woman haunted by a mysterious noise.) “Aren’t we having a good time?” Rosalind hums heartily. It’s the kind of vulgar intimidation she often uses to quiet her daughter’s “noise” as the two of them, trapped to an almost comical degree in a pragmatic English reserve, exchange pathetic courtesies and petty acts of care by day, while Julie wanders the maze-like corridors and rainy hotel grounds at night.
In his best moments, including a raucous – aggressive/emotional – exacerbated birthday dinner, and a couple of exchanges with the very lavish hotel night porter Bill (Joseph Medel), there is tremendous insight into the vast bay and a yawn between conversations we’d like to have with our mothers. And our girls, and the ones we finally make. Sometimes, no matter how determined you are to reach the unspeakably deep depths of your mutual love, guilt and remorse, all you can do is make a few comments about the magnificence of marmalade or the beauty of a gift wrap.
The frustration caused by that emotional indifference is real, but after the vivid and amazingly satisfying “Memorabilia” films, one can only hope that the Eternal Daughter similarly wishes honesty and energy reconcile. Instead, this slight story delves into the mystery of a mother-daughter bond without getting too close to solving it, and when the mist vanishes it is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.
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