The nights are drawing in. There’s frost underfoot. You can see your breath in the air. It’s the time of year for a chilly tale of the unexpected. And according to none other than Martin Scorsese, director Joanna Hogg is at the perfect point in her career to direct such a film. “He was trying to encourage me to make a ghost story,” Hogg recalls. “He just thought maybe it’s a direction I could go in. So I said: ‘Well, you know, give me some ghost stories to read.’” Scorsese was as good as his word – his suggestions included Rudyard Kipling’s They, Casting the Runes and The Mezzotint by MR James, some Robert Aickman, some Edith Wharton.
The result was Hogg’s evocative new film The Eternal Daughter. Executive produced by Scorsese, and starring Tilda Swinton, it is set in a remote and largely deserted hotel where a frail elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter have come for a birthday minibreak. It is the kind of old, mist-wreathed building where the floorboards creak mysteriously and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck for no known reason. Where you’re bound – surely – to spot at least one ghost …
