Director: Joanna Hogg
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydell and Carly-Sophia Davies
Premiere: 12/5/23
★★★
In The Eternal Girl, a gothic melodrama from Joanna Hogg, a filmmaker played by Tilda Swinton returns to the sprawling family mansion that has been repurposed as a secluded hotel. As she navigates this liminal space, she is accompanied by her elderly mother, also portrayed by Swinton, inviting viewers to ask whose memory is the true muse for this new project. The home becomes both refuge and riddle, a place where memory and place blur in unsettled, luminous ways.
The film marks Hogg’s first explicit foray into genre cinema since her acclaimed The Souvenir, and the opening movements set a tone that feels both intimate and theatrically charged. The mansion opens its doors not just to rooms and corridors, but to a mood—a mood that hints at ghosts without delivering the familiar jump scares. Early scenes unfold as if rehearsed in advance, with the director making deliberate choices that align the two central characters as if they were one entity split by time and memory. This self-conscious orchestration helps the viewer sense a haunted filmmaker confronting her own process, rather than a straightforward tale of fright.
The central question arises early: is this a ghost story in the traditional sense, or something more elusive? Hogg challenges the genre’s conventions by stripping away most of its conventional shocks, letting the aura of the space and the cadence of the dialogue carry the suspense. The mansion, shot with a clarity that makes its dust motes seem almost alive, becomes a character in its own right. Cinematographer Ed Rutherford captures the architecture and the landscape with a painterly restraint, turning the house into a phantasmagoria that feels meaningful rather than merely eerie. Yet the film resists easy categorization. It uses the trappings of gothic horror not to terrify, but to probe deeper anxieties about interpretation, memory, and the way physical spaces shape our inner lives.
Viewed through this lens, The Eternal Girl becomes a meditation on how memories are curated and reassembled for the screen. The dialogue oscillates between tenderness and critique, as the mother-daughter dynamic reveals layers of affection, tension, and unspoken histories. The film suggests that the act of filmmaking is itself a kind of hauntology—an attempt to conjure what is past and render it present, even if the process feels unstable or incomplete. The ensemble cast, anchored by Swinton’s fearless dual performance, navigates this delicate balance with a quiet precision that keeps the emotional stakes high even as the plot remains elusive.
What emerges is a work that feels less like a conventional narrative and more like a lyrical reflection on the craft of cinema. The setting becomes a landscape for memory to speak in fragments, and the characters move through it with a measured, almost ritual-like cadence. The film nods to classic mood-driven thrillers while insisting on its own idiosyncratic rhythm, a rhythm that invites viewers to piece together meaning from texture, silence, and what is left unsaid. In the end, The Eternal Girl is not so much a genre exercise as a meditation on how art negotiates the gaps between memory and memory-making, between space and story, between what we think we know and what we must learn to accept.