Tilda Swinton has very much been keeping it low key in the last year or so. Aside from offering up her life guide (‘Seek growth’; ‘Trust in change’) in Vogue’s latest issue – interviewing people on the cover? So last season, darling – she popped up very briefly in David Fincher’s The Killer, a bit more in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and… well, that’s been about your lot.
The much buzzed about Problemista was due in August but had its release put on pause due to the actors’ strike. Which leaves only this suspenseful creepy-fest – shot in secret in Wales during the Jan 2021 lockdown – as her only lead role in 2023. Or rather her only lead roles in 2023.
Because it was shot under Covid conditions, writer/director Joanna Hogg’s film is intimate out of necessity: featuring only a big Gothic house and five people, two of whom are played by Swinton. The daughter of the title (Swinton playing her own age) is a filmmaker who wants to make a movie about her elderly mother (for which Swinton is aged up a good thirty years).
Together they turn up at a spooky, eerie The Shining-style hotel where they are the only guests. There is a fabulously unhelpful receptionist (Carly Sophia-Davis making a very good debut), the more helpful older employee Bill (Joseph Mydell) and that’s pretty much it.
Hogg successfully dials up the tension and the sense that something is not quite right about this place from minute one. After this, things progress extremely slowly building to a tone that is… well, look, it’s impossible not to draw more comparisons to The Shining, so similar is The Eternal Daughter to Kubrick’s masterpiece in terms of premise, feel and in other ways that it would be a spoiler to go into too much.
The bigger problem, as with so many films where one actor plays two characters who have to spend a lot of time talking to each other, is that the Swinton/Swinton dynamic is distracting. A lot of the time you can’t forget that you are watching the same person playing both parts, which is a problem given the intimate nature of the conversations they are supposed to be having.
Perhaps it was the restrictions of the time – who can/wants to remember anymore? – but the mother being played by another actor not aged up would have drastically improved things.
96 mins, cert 12a
