Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is a film that exists in the liminal space between memory and reality, between the living and the spectral, between a mother and a daughter who may or may not be haunting each other. It is a gothic drama stripped of gothic excess, a psychological thriller without jump scares, and a love letter to the unresolved tensions that linger in every family.

Tilda Swinton, in a dual role as both the middle-aged filmmaker Rosalind and her elderly mother, Julie, delivers a masterclass in quiet restraint. There are no grand transformations, no prosthetics-heavy distinctions just the slightest shifts in posture, in cadence, in the way one woman carries the weight of her life while the other seems to dissolve into the past. The film unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a cavernous, half-empty hotel, a setting that feels less like a location and more like a metaphor for the mind echoey, half-remembered, full of corridors that lead back to the same emotional cul-de-sac.

Hogg’s direction is deliberate to the point of claustrophobia. The camera lingers on empty hallways, on half-open doors, on Swinton’s face as she listens for something just beyond hearing. The sound design is unnervingly precise creaking floorboards, distant murmurs, the hum of a radiator that might be whispering secrets. This is a ghost story where the ghost might just be time itself, or regret, or the simple, terrifying fact that we can never truly know the people we love.

If the film falters, it’s in its pacing, which risks mistaking stillness for profundity. There are moments when the atmosphere threatens to smother the narrative entirely, when the viewer might long for just a little more movement, a little more revelation. But perhaps that’s the point The Eternal Daughter isn’t interested in giving answers. It’s interested in the questions that hang in the air long after the credits roll.

This is a film for those who understand that the scariest thing isn’t what goes bump in the night it’s what stays silent in the daylight.