80
Metascore
34 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 98TheWrapCarlos AguilarTheWrapCarlos AguilarAfter the youthful splendor of last year’s The Souvenir Part II, Hogg returns with a magnificent achievement of a more inconspicuous kind: a striking phantasm of affection, regrets, and remembered accounts that might be factually inaccurate but emotionally unfeigned.
- 91The PlaylistTomris LafflyThe PlaylistTomris LafflyWhile The Eternal Daughter manages to sell a truly spine-tingling atmosphere of ghosts, it feels closer to a thought and style experiment in the aftermath. But the film’s time-and-logic bending final reveal arrives as a gut punch nonetheless, with a restrained parting note both ethereal and lifelike.
- 83IndieWireDavid EhrlichIndieWireDavid EhrlichWhere Hogg’s last two movies saw the filmmaker tracing a version of herself from memory, this one sees her tracing a memory from a version of herself.
- 80The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawThere’s real intimacy and emotional generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg – a personal movie which appears to come from the same universe as her earlier Souvenir films – or one very much like it.
- 80Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganScreen DailyFionnuala HalliganThe Eternal Daughter is at its most poignant when it plunges into the personal – in Swinton’s retreating mother and faltering daughter, you can sense the director’s power growing as she continues to acknowledge herself.
- 70The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinThe Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinIn the end, it plays a little too often like an academic pastiche of horror tropes even though its emotional core rings with resonance.
- 60Total FilmJane CrowtherTotal FilmJane CrowtherThis (will’o-the-)wisp of a film is a beauty depending on the eye of the beholder; frustratingly slender yet with moments of profundity.
- 60VarietyJessica KiangVarietyJessica KiangThis slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.
- 60Time OutPhil de SemlyenTime OutPhil de SemlyenEven by the writer-director’s standards of naturalistic, middle-class restraint, it’s a ruminative experience that borders on slow-going. But The Eternal Daughter is also an ode to mothers and daughters that will leave a few teary messes in the stalls, and it’s beautifully acted by Tilda Swinton in not one, but two roles.
- 60The TelegraphRobbie CollinThe TelegraphRobbie CollinThe Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.