Have Yourself An Eerie Little Christmas with Tilda

For all the interplanetary aquatic special effects on display in James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Joanna Hogg’s modest “The Eternal Daughter” needs only one — Tilda Swinton. The British actress plays both mother and daughter in this single-setting film, Hogg’s confined tale of inexplicable dread, not unlike Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.”  Under the bows of twisty tree branches in the Welsh countryside, an adult daughter and her aging mother arrive at a looming brick estate ever-shrouded in a pertinacious layer of fog. So gothic is the hotel, with its heavy brass room keys, that only the iPhones and their patchy signals give hints to our modern day.

Mentored after film school by the prominent avant-garde filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, London-born Joanna Hogg also struck up a friendship with Tilda Swinton in her youth. Swinton had been a collaborator of Jarman’s before the director died of AIDS complications in 1994, starring as Isabella of France in Jarman’s 1991 adaption of “Edward II” based on the play by Shakespeare’s famed rival, Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Hogg’s early films, more grounded in the subtleties of the here and now, focused on tense family dynamics in cloistered, even claustrophobic conditions.  Her most ambitious — and more interpretive — project was a two-part fictional account of her own early twenties, “The Souvenier” and “The Souvenir Part II.” Produced by Martin Scorcese, together they are a bildungsroman of treacherous heartbreak and the nasty wounds that love can leave. Detailing a romance gone wrong and the artistic, cathartic pursuits that come from that pain, Hogg tapped her old friend Swinton to play a version of her mother, named Rosalind, and Swinton’s real life daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, to play the young film student, a portrait of a Hogg, named Julie.

Sneakily, the mother and daughter in this latest film, now both played by Swinton, are Rosalind and Julie.

This is not the first time Swinton has pulled double duty on a film. Most recently in Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of “Suspiria” she portrayed the formidable head of a modern dance company in 1970s Berlin, an aging male psychologist, and the morbidly grotesque head witch of a supernatural coven — with all three characters playing off each other in the bloody final act. “The Eternal Daughter” is less showy in its theatricality, so much so that you can easily lose yourself in the double performance and its tender nuance, hardly noticing the gimmick.

Begins on Dec. 23 at The Moviehouse in Millerton, N.Y.

Swinton reprises her role as a version of the director's mother from The Souvenir films. Photo courtesy of MovieStillsDB

Swinton reprises her role as a version of the director's mother from The Souvenir films. Photo courtesy of MovieStillsDB