The Eternal Daughter review: Tilda Swinton see double in this eerie family tale

The English filmmaker was then promoting Archipelago, a spacious, mesmerising family drama set on the Scilly Isles and starring Tom Hiddleston (before he was Tom Hiddleston).

That film caught the attention of Martin Scorsese, who saw something in Hogg’s instinctual, introspective style. He has since put his money where his mouth is, producing Hogg’s last two films, the autofictional The Souvenir parts one and two.

Both were critically acclaimed and propelled the softly spoken Londoner to a new audience. They also featured Hogg’s lifelong friend and muse, Tilda Swinton.

With Scorsese in tow once again, a fertile threesome is reunited for this latest wade into the internal landscape of family in The Eternal Daughter – a phantasmic drama about a woman taking her mother on a break to an eerie country hotel, so that she can get to know her a bit better.

Fans of Hogg’s films and their spare, loosely structured beauty are in for a treat. Besides a tour de force performance by Swinton, it is a beguiling experience, full of mystique and poignancy. More broadly, it confirms Hogg as one of the most interesting and consistent writer-directors around.

Added interest in these quarters comes with it being a second collaboration with Dublin production company Element Pictures, now bona fide tastemakers following rapturous victories like Room, The Favourite, and Normal People, to name but three. (Incidentally, Hogg reserved special praise during our interview for another Element success story, Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage).

​Swinton double-jobs, playing Julie, a childless middle-aged filmmaker, and her mother, Rosalind. The pair, along with Rosalind’s springer spaniel Louis, arrive at their lodgings deep in the Welsh countryside one foggy evening.

From the get-go, something is a little off about the remote, mist-shrouded hotel. The young receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) doesn’t appear in any hurry to help solve a mix-up with the rooms, despite the hotel being devoid of any other guests.

There are strange sounds at night, and a simple journey to the bathroom finds Julie getting lost among the corridors and staircases. A lone glimmer of warmth is provided by Joseph Mydell’s kindly old night manager.

Julie goes out of her way to try and make everything nice and pleasant for Rosalind, but her fussing carries a motive – she intends to make a film about her mum, so this trip is as much about surreptitiously interviewing and observing as celebrating the old dear’s birthday.

The general eeriness about the place is not helped by Rosalind’s unhappy childhood memories of her time ensconced here during the London Blitz, back when the hotel was a stately family pile.

Hanging over everything is the recent death of Julie’s father, and the growing realisation that she herself will only ever be a daughter, never a mother. Between the antiquated interiors and creaking hallways, she might as well be trapped inside an MR James ghost story. But as the bumps in the night become more pronounced, a weird aligning takes place between the two women.

Hogg is a storyteller who likes to tease it out and let the audience make their own discoveries. She’s as playfully cunning with reflections and camera flips as she is with her characters’ expressions and responses.

While heavy on classic ghost story tropes, this is not a film of frights, merely one where the nebulous terrain of Julie’s ‘mummy issues’ are feeding into a spectral outward manifestation. It also occurs to you that the protagonist from Hogg’s previous brace of films was also a Julie – in that saga a young film student negotiating early adulthood.

Were you to sell the concept of Tilda Swinton to someone who had never heard of her, it’d be hard to think of a more convincing argument than this turn.

Her note-perfect two-hander is made all the more incredible by the knowledge that most of the dialogue throughout is improvised, Hogg’s gut-instinct methodology preferring a story ‘scaffolding’ over anything tightly scripted or mapped out.

Let’s hope the two women continue to put their mutual trust to good use for years to come. With each outing, Hogg’s ongoing project to unlock the mysteries of family is gaining a confidence and momentum that is all her own.

Four stars