Sandro Kopp/A24
Director Joanna Hogg and Tilda Swinton may only be on their third feature film collaboration, but they’re deep into their fifth decade of friendship. Perhaps that’s what makes their newest partnership, The Eternal Daughter, so emotionally resonant—their enduring connection that spans not only life’s great milestones but its minutiae as well.
“It’s true that we’ve known each other for a very long time,” Swinton told the audience when the film screened recently at the New York Film Festival. “I’ve not only known Joanna, but I’ve also known her mother since I was a child, and we’ve been talking about our relationships with our mothers for 50 years. All of that talk and all of those wonderings have only got us so far. We still have to involve fantasy.”
That fantasy now comes in the form of a chilling British ghost story, The Eternal Daughter, slated for a potential December release from A24, the distributor that has become known (somewhat to its detriment) for bringing smaller-scale, avant-garde horror to the big screen. Whether one would call The Eternal Daughter a proper horror film is at the viewer’s discretion; it certainly doesn’t share many of the elements that we’re used to seeing in a piece of modern horror cinema. But like the most effective entries in the genre, it’s a film that settles itself in the bones for days after, lingering and mutating like a memory.