The Eternal Daughter (2022)
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The Eternal Daughter Movie Review
The Eternal Daughter is a 2022 mystery drama film directed by Joanna Hogg and starring Tilda Swinton in a dual role. It is a frustratingly disappointing movie.
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“That’s what rooms do.
They hold these stories“
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Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home. Eventually it is revealed that the mother is dead in a twist that everybody who has watched more ten movies in their life would clock from the start. This made the film a failed mystery as it’s never all that puzzling or intriguing.
This is supposed to be a Gothic story, but it utterly disappointed in that regard given that the atmosphere is almost non-existent. There are a couple of outdoors sequences that are shot and scored in a way to evoke suspense and intrigue, but those are all too rare. The majority of the film is inside the hotel in a room and those scenes were endless and tedious.
I understand that this movie was personal for writer-director Joanna Hogg, but just like this year’s ‘Aftersun’, she did not manage to elevate the material to a cinematic status with a universal appeal. The result is a movie that can only appeal to her and the pretentious critics with the appeal for regular moviegoers being entirely absent.
The dialogue is strong, there is no doubt about that. There are some very moving moments to be found in this film with the highlight being the emphasis on the two’s varying expectations of each other, which perfectly showcases how demanding it is to be both a parent and a child.
My issue with The Eternal Daughter is that it was too slow to hook me personally. It is a short movie, but it felt ridiculously long due to its snaillike pace. Another huge problem is Tilda Swinton’s performance. She is a great actress, but she simply couldn’t bring to the table two different women all on her own.
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The result is a puzzling casting choice that posed a problem more than a cool gimmick. They should have just cast a different actress in the role of the mother. The technical aspects here are solid, but Hogg failed to elevate the movie with her pedestrian direction. She is a very overrated director.
The Eternal Daughter had an interesting premise and it has a couple of moving moments, but it utterly failed as a Gothic mystery due to the almost total absence of strong atmosphere. It also did not succeed as a drama owing to its sluggish pacing and an unconvincing Tilda Swinton performance in a dual role, which was a poor casting choice that simply did not work.
My Rating – 2.5
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