Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, a ghost story set in a country house hotel, revels in cinematic in-jokes and the English Eerie. Yet the foggy pallor of the film, as filmmaker Julie struggles to write about her ailing mother, Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton), unintentionally captures the horror of a white culture of tote bags, vintage M R James Penguins and niceties at mealtimes. Notably, the spooky spell, as in Hogg’s earlier The Souvenir films, is broken by a Black man.
LWLies: You’ve played with genre before: melodrama, musical, screwball. Even more relevantly, here, because Julie is a filmmaker. How did you judge how to pull back, not capsize the raw emotion? Hogg: I could have gone further, but it’s a story about this relationship. Plot can get in…
