Criticism of ‘The Eternal Daughter’, Joanna Hogg’s gothic melodrama with Tilda Swinton

In ‘The Eternal Daughter’, gothic melodrama directed by Joanna Hogg, a filmmaker (Tilda Swinton) looks for inspiration in her old family home, a mansion converted into a hotel. she accompanies him his elderly mother (also Tilda Swinton), whose memory you want to nurture your new film. The first chords of the new from the director of Souvenir (2019) suggest a foray into genre cinema. The arrival at the house opens the door to a mystery. The first walks through the rooms of the mansion suggest that there are ghosts there. And the conversation between mother and daughter specifies the idea of ​​the double, visually formulated in advance with the choice of the same actress for both characters. And all of that is true and at the same time it is not. Joanna Hogg, who shoots this misty story with her usual delicacy, delves into genre cinema, yes. Is this a ghost movie. But it distills its codes, strips them. It relativizes the mystery and dispenses with both surprise (revelation is not so much) and shock. This is not to say that his film lacks worry: backed by Ed Rutherford’s magnificent cinematography, Hogg turns that mansion in the middle of nowhere into a suggestive phantasmagoria. But it is not a strictly genre film. The director uses the settings, atmospheres and characters of a gothic horror film to address other types of concerns, especially the fear of not knowing how to interpret and crystallize in fiction (the painful writing of the daughter) neither what the memory provides you nor what the spaces, the places, suggest you in which the things that have led you to her happened.