At first, Joanna Hogg’s latest film The Eternal Daughter follows the conventions of a ghost story. On a winter’s night a taxi cab approaches a tall, gothic hotel, its deserted grounds shrouded in mist. As it does so, the driver tells the two women in the back about seeing a white figure at the window of an empty room. His passengers are revenants themselves, both in the context of the plot (Julie is bringing her elderly mother Rosalind back to the stately home near the Welsh border where she stayed during the Second World War) and the film itself (most viewers will be aware that these are versions of the same mother and daughter that appeared in Hogg’s The Souvenir [2019] and The Souvenir: Part II [2021]). The central conceit of The Eternal Daughter is that both characters are played by Tilda Swinton, a trickery produced by shot-reverse-shots and makeup so convincing that it doesn’t look like makeup at all. Before watching the film, I couldn’t imagine this being anything but a gimmick, yet within minutes it started to feel appropriate. The gothic is, after all, a genre populated by doppelgangers and recurring figures, where time itself feels fraught and delicate, like something that might fold in on itself at every moment.
Hogg’s last three films have been about her own life and in the broader context of this increasingly biographical output, her use of Swinton is logical: there is, in her shift to a more inward-looking gaze, a general sense of narrowing in and doubling down. Hogg has described this third instalment of Julie’s story as a kind of “coda” to the Souvenir films, in which Honor Swinton Byrne, her goddaughter and Swinton’s actual daughter played Julie and, therefore, a younger version of both Hogg and Swinton herself. This casting decision was met with justified comments about nepotism in the film industry (Hogg and Swinton met at an exclusive private school when they were ten), but with this doubled use of Swinton it begins to seem conceptually necessary: the memory of Swinton Byrne lives on in Swinton’s performance, heightened by our knowledge of their connection. In both Souvenir films, Hogg used her own possessions to meticulously reconstruct her old flat. In Part II, Swinton Byrne appears in scenes from ‘Caprice’, the film Hogg made in while studying at the National Film and Television School which starred Swinton, literally retracing her mother’s footsteps. Likewise, in The Eternal Daughter, which evolved from a process in which Hogg and Swinton improvised together on camera, something Hogg described in an interview with Christine Smallwood as making her feel “like I was becoming one of the characters, because, you know, of my own relationship with my mother, and how I feel as a daughter,” the presence of an actual mother and daughter adds another mirrored dimension to this ongoing investigation of maternal bonds and the debt the present owes to the past.
Hogg’s earlier films, Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013), all address similar themes to The Eternal Daughter, namely stifled communication in upper-class English families and women without children considering their choices. These films all unfold as broadly realist, linear narratives. The Eternal Daughter, on the other hand, is entirely caught up in reflexive loops. After Julie receives a call from a cousin suggesting they meet for lunch, mother and daughter decide that it would be better “if it could be just us”, an elected isolation which characterises the entire film. Apart from a brief encounter with this unwelcome cousin on the driveway, the only other characters that interrupt the mother-child dyad are service staff: a nameless receptionist, and a friendly groundskeeper, Bill. When she is introduced to him for the first time, Julie, hearing ‘Bill’, clarifies, “William?”, wanting to emphasise that this was her father’s name. We are never outside the family.
The Eternal Daughter is structured almost like a psychoanalytic case history. Julie is experiencing a creative blockage: her secret purpose in organising the trip is to write a film about her mother, and she surreptitiously records her reminiscing about her former experiences in the hotel. We see her reading the analyst and writer Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint, first published in 1950 under the pseudonym Joanna Field, a book which uses Milner’s own artistic block to theorise the internal forces which prevent creative expression. Milner’s book is, in Hannah Zeavin’s words, a “diary of inability”: so too is Hogg’s film.[1] Julie’s progress is thwarted by inconveniences both major and minor: the room isn’t right, and the receptionist is obstinate; the hotel itself is unsettling empty; she is kept awake by unusual noises and glowing green lights; her mother won’t play ball. A recurring theme is Julie’s guilt: she is worried about invading her mother’s privacy, about the violation that filming might represent. (In interviews Hogg has spoken of wanting to make the film after Unrelated but feeling “too guilty”. The project re-emerged during lockdown: “I was very preoccupied with my mother and whether she was going to be okay. We were all thinking a lot about mortality”).
For the most part, Rosalind is irritated by her daughter’s impulse to document and excavate: though she is delighted when Julie produces two stuffed animals, presumably dating from her childhood, she refuses to let her daughter see the contents of the white plastic bag she has brought with her, which is full of, in her words, “things to go through; letters and papers and stuff.” When Julie suggests that there might be “things in there that I would value that you wouldn’t”, Rosalind notes that she can “sense” her interest: “I’m sure you’re going to make a film about it.” Yet if Rosalind reads this as a solely professional impulse on Julie’s behalf, such a desire to catalogue is also a pre-emptive response to grief: the urge to gather as much as possible. (On my phone, I have hundreds of badly lit, blurry selfies I took with my grandmother in her nursing home, along with pictures of half-finished crosswords we did together. I never look at them.) Throughout the film, repeated shots of Rosalind’s things – a discarded pair of fluffy slippers, a jewellery box full of trinkets – take on a certain kind of poignancy. When the film’s twist, which is that Rosalind is already dead and Julie is in the hotel alone is, arrives, it is both brutally surprising and something we realise, deep down, we already knew.
If in the Souvenir films we saw a more straightforward representation of a life story – the proto-auteur from the perspective of the auteur – in The Eternal Daughter we are invited to consider the way history expresses itself within an individual psyche and the ways in which our relationships are stymied and obstructed by their own pasts. The Julie we encounter here is not embarking on her first journey away from home: that initial, liberating maternal separation. Instead, now a fully-fledged adult, she is cast back into daughterhood repeatedly. With its empty hotel and dead father, The Eternal Daughter is a film that seriously considers the possibility of it being “just us.” Rosalind and Julie’s stilted communication – “Lovely, darling”, “You’re spoiling me, darling” – is circumscribed by their class background, yes, but also by the more general spectre of ‘mother-daughter time’: this is Time together with a capital T, emotionally loaded and inseparable from duty. In such confines, Julie undergoes a relatable regression, a familiar retreat into an earlier role: half-resentful, half-pleading, she either wants not to be there at all or for everything to be perfect. This is compounded by the fact that Rosalind is telling her things that she doesn’t want to hear: “I find it difficult,” Julie confesses to Bill, “to think of her being sad. I just want her to be happy all the time.” Rosalind herself, recalling being in the hotel when she heard that her brother’s plane had been shot down during the war, patiently explains to her crying, apologising daughter, who is horrified that this return is bringing up anything but “happy memories”, that if Julie wants to collect the memories associated with the hotel, then she needs to be able to handle them. “That’s what rooms do, they hold these stories,” sounds, in this context, like “Be careful what you wish for.”
Julie’s entrapment in an “eternal” daughterhood is heightened, at least from her own perspective, by the fact that she herself does not have children. At one point she overhears Rosalind talking to Bill about her thwarted grandmaternal ambitions, in which she offers the familiar suggestion that instead of progeny Julie “has her work, she has her films.” If Julie’s films are comparable to offspring, and therefore function in some way as Rosalind’s grandchildren, then this film in particular is doubly symbolic: Julie is trying to reproduce her mother in celluloid, rather than through the transmission of genetic material. This gestures towards a more expansive understanding of maternity, one that doesn’t rely on linearity. (We remember, too, that the hotel used to belong to Rosalind’s childless aunt, who “filled” the place with children; she has a more important role in her memories than her actual mother.) The academic and psychotherapist Lisa Baraitser has argued for a definition of “maternal time” as a temporality specifically related to the repetition of maintenance labour and the “tenuous processes of maintaining familial relations across and between generations”: to do so, she draws on Denise Riley’s work on maternal grief. In Riley’s account of the way loss can create a kind of “suspended time” in her book Time Lived, Without Its Flow, a gestational temporality is identified in which the future literally unfolds within the present over the nine months of pregnancy, and then unspools in both parties forever, reaching backwards and forwards simultaneously. “My time is your time,” the mother says to the child, and vice versa. Julie is an “eternal daughter”, then, not just in her nonreproductive status but in the structure of the film itself: the mother and the daughter cannot be separated, even after death. In her conversation with Bill, Rosalind follows her statement about the substitutionary relationship between children and art with a far more radical understanding of maternity: “I’m sad for her that she doesn’t have a child, because I think she would have been a wonderful mother. But the truth is, she is a wonderful mother. She has a great capacity for the practical magic of love. She does it well, and these days I’m always the recipient; well, I’ve always been the recipient.” Mothering, here, is something that can be passed backwards, from Julie to Rosalind: a gift returned.
Still, despite this acknowledgement of more complex temporalities of care, maternity in this film is explicitly related to production. If films function as children and The Eternal Daughter dramatises the inability to make a film, we have to interpret Rosalind as central to Julie’s blockage. To be trapped in daughterhood is to be unable to produce. In interviews, Hogg has alluded to the influence of Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘They’ on the film. In it, a motorist comes across a stately home full of children who, he later realises you can only see if you have experienced the death of your own. The loss of a child is one of the stories Rosalind tells that Julie is not prepared to hear: lying in bed, she recalls being in the same room, at the same time of year, “When I was expecting my baby.” That individualising and distancing “my” tells us that she is not talking about Julie but another baby, a baby who, it transpires, never arrived. Rosalind’s description of miscarriage is self-flagellating – she suggests it may have been brought on by a “too long” walk, and that she was “not nice” to her husband afterwards – and her feeling, recalling this abrupt and undefinable loss, is one of “dread”.
Rosalind, here, is considering her own inability to communicate with her husband, overcoming it, in some way at least, by her honesty with her daughter. Julie, however, remains stymied. This is the scene in which we see Julie reading On Not Being Able to Paint, a book which is contextually inextricable from maternity. Milner, a founder member of the Independent Group of British Psychoanalysts and an analysand of D. W. Winnicott, was part of the post-war generation of analysts whose work on the relationship between the infant and the mother was integrated into the nascent welfare state in the 1950s, the time to which we can loosely date Rosalind’s own miscarriage. On Not Being Able to Paint is dedicated, with a painful optimism, “To my son and his generation and may they not take as long as I have in finding out about these matters.” In the book, which is about ‘Sunday painters’, amateurs rather than professionals, Milner details her discovery that “doodling”, or automatic drawing, could be both an artistic and a therapeutic tool. In “making free drawings and then interpreting them,” Milner is, in Zeavin’s words, identifying “re-emerging aspects of herself that she might have repressed or split off.” Blockages, in this way, can be named and cleared.[2] This echoes Hogg’s description of her own artistic practice. In her interview with Smallwood, Hogg classifies her own experiences of taking painting lessons in “a totally amateur way” as “incredibly therapeutic”, before identifying “a similar urge” motivating her filmmaking. This urge might be found in the method itself, which feels akin to the free associative speech that underpinned early psychoanalytic practice. Rather than write scripts, she produces “road maps” that frame the story, with the specifics emerging during the “open-ended” filming process itself. In this way, making films seems to function therapeutically, even remedially. Hogg told Smallwood that she finds it difficult to describe the process once it has finished, especially if it draws on personal material: “I can’t keep carrying that around with me after I finish the film. So, it’s in the past now, and I’m also not interested anymore. I’ve moved on.”
At the very end of The Eternal Daughter, Julie’s blockage clears: she sits on the bed in a room we now realise she isn’t sharing with anyone, typing the opening scene for the film we’ve just watched. By fully letting her mother in, she has created the conditions through which she can finally pass out again, into the work. The primary moment of cathartic realisation comes in the preceding scene: it is Rosalind’s birthday dinner, and Julie spoils it. Rosalind, visibly very unwell, fading before our very eyes, only wants a glass of champagne, doesn’t want to eat: Julie gets angry, shouting “I’m trying to make you happy, I’m trying all the time to make you happy. Can’t you just tell me? You’re just a mystery person to me.” Contemplating the future, she continues, “I don’t have any children! I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.” Moments later, with Rosalind sitting mutely at the table, Julie brings in a birthday cake with one candle, the camera following her as she sings happy birthday in a desperately bright, wobbling voice. Rosalind can’t quite blow it out. “Do you want me to do it?” asks Julie. She does, and, as the camera pans out, we see that she is sitting at the table alone, sobbing. This scene feels cathartic not just in the articulation of Julie’s long-repressed feelings, but in its broader implications: we are reminded of the inevitability of loss. (As Chantal Akerman writes, as voiced through her character Béatrice in A Couch in New York, “That’s the problem with mothers. They get sick and then they die”). As well as identifying and moving through, at least in some way, her grief, during her stay in the hotel Julie has also worked through some of her fantasies. At an earlier dinner where she is also sobbing and apologising, Rosalind says “Darling, it’s not your fault.” “Nothing,” she continues, “is your fault.” After the birthday, Bill (William, the same name as her father) comes to Julie’s room to check on her. “I didn’t get it right,” she tells him. “You got everything right”, he replies. Recalling Hogg’s account of her films as outlets – “it’s in the past now, and I’m also not interested anymore. I’ve moved on” – I can’t help but think again of Zeavin’s essay on Milner: “The realized artist is also an analyst.”
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.
[1] Hannah Zeavin, ‘Untreated: Revisiting Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint’, Portable Gray, Vol. 5 No. 2 (Fall 2022), 268-277, p. 270.
[2] The academic Claire Pajaczkowska has suggested that a new appreciation of humming can be grounded in Milner’s work, reading the hum—a state both ‘mundane and divine’—as ‘the acoustic equivalent of doodling’. A central moment in Jovan Adjer’s soundtrack to Hogg’s film is an eerie hum, seemingly emanating from the walls, before we realise that it’s the receptionist doing her make-up at the bottom of the stairs