The Eternal Daughter

I fear I may have hit my Tilda Swinton saturation point. Not that I'm exactly tired of the brilliant British actor and movie star, but her omnipresence in a certain type of prestige picture wears on me. That said, she gives two excellent performances in the latest from writer/director Joanna Hogg. Swinton was also featured playing the mother of her own daughter Honor Swinton Byrne in Hogg's prior pictures, the semi-autobiographical The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II. Here, she plays both mother and daughter in Hogg's gothic drama about a filmmaker and her elderly mother who check in to a seemingly vacant hotel, which use to be a family home, for a stay that leads to the exploration of long-buried secrets.

I've got to hand it to Swinton, she disappears into both roles so convincingly that within three minutes we stop thinking that we're watching the same actress playing both roles in, what is essentially, a two-hander. But Hogg brings the same doleful ostentatious minimalism to this picture as to the rest of her recent work. Were The Eternal Daughter a thirty-minute short, I think I'd really get on board with it. But the film's protracted pacing, clotted visual style, and constricted emotionalism burden this story at feature length. Watching it, you know where it's all going and you just want it to get there. The film is not really a mystery per se, it's a character study in an atmospheric setting, but it's structured as if it were a mystery, so when it reaches its inevitable conclusion you feel slighted. I half expected Peggy Lee’s "Is That All There Is?” to be the closing credit song. So perhaps it's not Swinton I'm growing tired of after all, perhaps it's just that I dislike the way the Joanna Hogg Cinematic Universe is shaping up. I feel as unpleasantly trapped in her austere British dramas as I do in the MCU.