Julie is putting together a ghost story, about her recently deceased mother. You might wonder whether she's not trivialising the woman's life by giving the unfillable hole she left the shape of a ghost, and that something so obvious and transferrable as a ghost is ill-suited to the tragic singularity of a death, that death never has a precedent, even in death, and you'd be forgiven, but I'll come to that. The most shocking thing in The Eternal Daughter is a door, specifically the carved head in a high relief that protrudes from a door, that is the door to the drawing room. If it seems inconsequential to fixate on a door, then just know that the action that drives The Eternal Daughter is Julie going through doorways, and that director Joanna Hogg rarely truncates the action: Julie opens a door and walks out of the shot through the doorway, we are in the next room and watching the doorway as Julie walks into the next shot, closes the door behind her, often locks it. Most of these doors are very nondescript, and it's only in the very deliberate way their use is documented that they rise to our attention. And so the high relief door I mention already stands out in a film of and about doors, and what shocks about the door is the way the relief moves when the door is opened and closed.
Pivoting from its hinge, the carved head of the door moves from side to front. The film traces an unbroken forty-five degree rotation that demonstrates the three-dimensionality of the wooden object. It's the most three-dimensional thing in The Eternal Daughter. Its arrival exposes the flatness of the images making up the last thirty minutes, and that will define the next hour. Julie by way of contrast to the head in the high relief door is either already sitting in a room, camera flat against her face and body, or is walking through doorways, by their very nature flat, into shots that are already waiting for her. Whenever Julie is about to move through the flatness of the composition, the cut will reconfigure a new composition that accounts for, and flattens, this movement. Hogg's formalism deliberately negates any dimensionality in the hotel and in the human figure. Space is a pre-defined unit, an empty container, a corridor that cannot possibly connect to a room but which instead transforms every room into another corridor. Julie comes and goes, and the room, empty, is already there. The issue with this is that Julie is putting together a ghost story, and a ghost story requires a specificity flatness precludes. When Julie wants to imagine that the hotel is haunted, the space fills with fog and darkness, instantly mimicking a Lawrence Gordon Clark Ghost Story for Christmas. Beautiful, but without the eerie naturalism of its referents, and fading back to flatness as quickly as the connection is made. Julie is either a figure in a corridor or a figure before a backdrop signifying a haunting that can't arrive, and whatever the case neither she nor the space she inhabits could be said to contain anything beyond a mutual blankness.
For about half an hour, possibly up until the relief in the door, I thought The Eternal Daughter might be one of those texts about a person busying themselves with minor activities as a distraction from some reality they can't discern but which they know is there, working on what's before them (think a frustrating comedy of manners that has begun to sink into Jessica Hausner's Hotel (2004)), but then I realised it's about Julie trying and failing to construct this kind of a story, or a story about her mother's memory, or a story about her mother's life, or a story about anything that would indicate the presence of something more than what's immediately before her. A story that would create, or even just suggest, spatial, temporal, affective dimension. The Eternal Daughter fails because it has to, for the reasons above: there is no language, cinematic or otherwise, through which to make something productive of loss, and the work truest to loss will be the one that comes up against and truly confronts its absence, only to then fail in its objective, when its objective is resolution. The work of loss is the hard-won revelation of irresolution, gained only by trying and failing to resolve it. This is why Swinton plays both roles, this is why she frantically turns to the voice recorder on her phone when she remembers something, this is why she sits all day reading what looks like an old Wordsworth Classics ghost story collection and calling it 'work', and why, when she remembers that her mother was a person and not a character in her book, it all becomes too much to bear. She is, without realising it, frightened by the prospect of there being more. Flatness, the thing she tells herself she's wanting to overcome, in fact shields her from being subjected to the unsignifiable horror of her loss. It propels her attempts to do something with it, and it awaits her at every conclusion. It's only recognising the irresolution underpinning her loss that Julie is free to leave, having failed to produce sense.
A final note on the title. Julie overhears her mother Rosalind talking to Bill, about how Julie elected not to have children, and to make her films her life's work instead. Rosalind doesn't say anything about it either way, but hearing it laid out like this sets Julie to wonder whether she's disqualified herself from growing up; to remain the eternal daughter and never graduate to the mother. It's not fair to say that Julie worries about this exactly, but that she worries that Rosalind might, and this is what worries her. Every night Julie and Rosalind fight politely over this, this being Julie's inability to know what Rosalind wants: for dinner, from conversation, of Julie. But so what does Rosalind want from Julie? We'll never know. This, I think, is the crux of the film, and the source of the frustrating emptiness of its style. Each shot is carefully composed, and in search of something to be in search of. Compared to Hausner's film mentioned earlier, where our gaze wanders the frame, desperate to locate the important thing that we know is there but which we can't see, Hogg's is listless, concerned with fabricating mystery and yet bereft of requisite desire. Julie in one sense holds her mother to be the keeper of the meaning she's without, and also knows that this is a fantasy, that her mother too was always lost, that now she's gone. It's for this reason the film has already given up, not on meaning, but on the fantasy of overcoming loss and finding something more. The Eternal Daughter is a funny and very affecting rumination on lack and failure.
21 October 2025