MUM’S THE WORD

Set in the most unsettling movie hotel since The Shining, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter brings us a double dose of Tilda Swinton for a fog-shrouded tale about parents, children and the ties that bind. A quivering, shivering Total Film digs into a uniquely elegant ghost story.

Joanna Hogg is sheltering in a shopping centre about two hours north of Rome. The British filmmaker has taken time out from her vacation to talk to Total Film about her new movie, ghostly tale The Eternal Daughter, which she seems pleased to do. ‘I’m not very good on holiday,’ she says. ‘I wish I was better at just relaxing, but I just can’t do it.’ Still, it feels apt to speak during such an excursion, given The Eternal Daughter follows the story of a mother and her grown-up daughter holidaying in an isolated hotel where things really do go bump in the night.

The idea grew out of personal experience. From the age of 12, Hogg and her mother would go on short trips together, for a few days at a time, often venturing north of the border to attend the Edinburgh Festival. ‘We’d go and stay in a little hotel or a pub with rooms above it… We’d go and stay somewhere,’ she recalls. ‘And it was always really nice, but there was also always a point where things got… It wasn’t always easy. And of course, my mother’s not around any more now. So I miss those times together. They were really precious.’

She’s not the only one. Tilda Swinton, the star of The Eternal Daughter, has been a close friend of Hogg’s right back to 1971, when they were both in dorms at West Heath Girls’ School. As Swinton explained at last year’s Venice Film Festival, long before the SAG-AFTRA strike: ‘Joanna and I have spoken for 50 years about our mothers and neither of our mothers are with us any more. My mother moved on earlier than shooting this film. And Joanna and I had talked a lot about the entanglement of a mother and a daughter – even after the mother has left – and the projections involved.’

Previously, Swinton featured in both The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), Hogg’s acclaimed, autobiographical tales from her time as a young film student. In those, she played Rosalind, mother to Julie, the film student played by her own offspring, Honor Swinton Byrne. In The Eternal Daughter, the mother and daughter are also called Rosalind and Julie, the latter a middle-aged filmmaker looking to document her parent’s life. So is this some kind of warped sequel to the Souvenir films? Is Hogg playing a little game with us?

‘I mean, not even a little game. The only names that rang true for this story, which I never saw as an extension of The Souvenir actually… Well, the only names that rang true were Rosalind and Julie. And then I feel… Well, maybe you see it a different way. But for me, the connections stopped there because it’s in a very different key. Stylistically and thematically. I was playing with something different. So in some ways, I now think, “Oh, I wish I’d given them other names.” So people didn’t think that it was a third part or something. Very much in my mind, it isn’t.’

Where the film really twists is that Swinton doesn’t just play Julie. Aged up, sporting tweeds, she is Rosalind as well. Taking on multiple roles is nothing new to her, having featured in various guises in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. But Hogg never intended for something similar: ‘It never entered my head that she would also be Rosalind.’ After discussing various actors who could take on the part, it was only when Swinton casually suggested it that the idea took form. ‘The thing I was worried about is that it would seem like a gimmick,’ says Hogg.

For Swinton, it was anything but. ‘This idea of them being played by the same person… makes it an entirely different film.’ Returning to this idea of the dynamic between a mother and a daughter, it morphs into something more profound. ‘How much do we separate? And how much of our mother is our projection, how much of our daughter is our projection? This whole question then became alive for us. And so once we’d had this idea, we didn’t look back.’

Hogg originally thought about writing The Eternal Daughter back in 2008, but at that point it wasn’t a ghost story. ‘I eventually put it aside… out of guilt and not wanting to trespass on my mother’s life. So framing it as a ghost story helped to remove it from my own experience and my own relationship with my mother.’ When she picked it up again, during the first lockdown, she had help from one Martin Scorsese, who had been executive producer on her 2013 movie Exhibition and the Souvenir films.

‘I asked him to recommend me some short ghost stories – not films, but books. And he gave me a fantastic list of stories to read, including one by [Rudyard] Kipling called They, which ended up having a big influence on the film because it’s a very moving story, partly based on Kipling’s own experience of losing a child. And that was the first time I’d read a ghost story that reduced me to tears and made me think this film, The Eternal Daughter, can have an uneasy atmosphere. But also, hopefully, go very deep emotionally.’

Uneasy is the word. Kipling aside, Henry James’ classic tale The Turn of the Screw and the ghost stories of Edith Wharton were also mood-setters for a tale based in a fog-shrouded hotel. As the floorboards creek and the wind groans, Julie is rattled by a faint but persistent thumping. The hotel, she’s told, is full, but where is everyone? Aside from Rosalind’s dog Louis (Swinton’s spaniel in real life), the only other souls are the frosty receptionist (Carly- Sophia Davies) and the hotel’s kindly night porter Bill (Joseph Mydell), very much channelling vibes from Stanley Kubrick’s own masterly hotel horror, The Shining.

Intriguingly, Hogg also makes use of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which Kubrick also mined for his film. ‘It’s another movement from the same piece of music,’ she says, outlining that she was careful not to choose exactly the same music ‘because it’s got such direct connections with The Shining’. You won’t find rivers of blood flowing through the maze-like corridors, but this space appears to be haunted by events of the past. As we discover, the hotel was Rosalind’s former family home, the walls witness to more than one painful memory.

In reality, Hogg’s team shot in Soughton Hall, a Grade II-listed country house in Flintshire, Wales, an experience that left her ‘spooked’, she says. ‘I made myself stay there while we were filming. There were just a handful of us who opted to stay in the hotel, and I did it, a lot out of convenience, because it meant I could just jump out of bed and be on the set straight away. But also, I thought, well, maybe something useful will come out of it. And I didn’t sleep very well. Everyone’s imaginations got more and more active. And I don’t know whether it’s because of the film that we were making, but, yeah, all sorts of things were heard and not quite seen.’

Aside from the technical challenges of creating a landscape drenched in fog (‘A fair amount of effort and money went into making sure that was always there,’ says Hogg), the biggest decision was how to shoot Swinton in both roles. Filmed in story order, there were to be no tricks, no over-the-shoulder shots where you’re aware of mother and daughter both in the frame. ‘I had to do it very simply,’ says Hogg. ‘I think twice or three times you see them both in the same frame, but otherwise, they’re very much individuals.’

As Swinton puts it: ‘It’s inspired… to have no over-the-shoulders, to have no paraphernalia, no doubles. No somebody else with a similar wig. None of that. Just this person. And then this person. It’s a very brave and inspired artistic choice and not only on her behalf, but the team. I mean, Ed Rutherford, who’s the extraordinary director of photography, just committed to that and lit it in such a way that for my money, you don’t question.’

Even more remarkably, the dialogues were improvised by Swinton, who role-played the conversations, fleshing out the exchanges between the two characters.

‘Tilda was incredible, keeping the energy going from the first half of the conversation,’ says Hogg. ‘And then I didn’t mind if what the mother responds to isn’t exactly the same; the fact that it didn’t always match, I thought was interesting. We’re not always on the same wavelength in [life].’ Says Swinton: ‘[It’s a] glorious way of working, because it means that you can go any which way.’

Less audible than the dialogue, though just as crucial, was the meticulous sound design. Hogg worked in Dolby Atmos for the first time, creating an immersive soundscape for the hotel. ‘It really goes beyond just surround sound. It really does envelop you,’ she says. ‘The sound was a huge part of it… It’s really elaborate.’ She even asked Davies, when she wasn’t playing the receptionist, to help out by creating a unique, ethereal groan. ‘Carly is also a singer and has a wonderful voice,’ explains Hogg, ‘and she’s sometimes the sound of the wind.’

‘THIS IDEA OF THEM BEING PLAYED BY THE SAME PERSON MAKES IT A DIFFERENT FILM’

TILDA SWINTON

It all feeds into The Eternal Daughter’s disquieting atmosphere, conjuring up a ghost story – or a grief story – with an emotional core. If it’s a film about fears of mortality, of the inevitable pain of losing a parent, Swinton points out there’s catharsis to be had: ‘Making the film was partly an exercise in making friends with projection, not being frightened of it, not being frightened of being haunted. And also acknowledging that just because someone exits the building, the conversation can continue. It doesn’t have to end.’

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 24 NOVEMBER. Tilda Swinton was speaking at the Venice Film Festival 2022, ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike.