This article appeared in the December 1, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022)
The most fearsome hauntings tend to come from those whom we know intimately. Suspended in spectral purgatory, the spirits of our forebears invoke a shared yet inaccessible past that destabilizes our present. In The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg teases out the inherently gothic nature of the intergenerational dynamic, contriving a ghost story out of that most primordial and murky of close unions—that of a mother and daughter. Two women who are also one.
Riffing on her previous two features, The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), both auto-fictional portraits of the artist as a young woman, Hogg once again summons her heroine-cum-surrogate, Julie Hart. But gone is the fledgling