Tilda Swinton, shapeshifting multitasker extraordinare, may be one of the few living actors who run the risk of seeming lazy if they play only one character per movie. Conniving identical twins, like the ones she played in "Hail, Caesar!" and "Okja," are a particular specialty of hers. Even showier were the three roles she pulled off in the recent "Suspiria" remake, with the help of some impressive old-age prosthetics. One day, I imagine, Swinton will beat her own personal record from the 1992 science-fiction indie "Teknolust," in which she played four roles: a scientist and her three cyborg clones.
Until then, there's "The Eternal Daughter," a suave and enigmatic haunted-house movie in which Swinton plays two women — a film director, Julie, and her mother, Rosalind — spending a December holiday in the remote Welsh countryside. Their destination is a ramshackle old hotel that, in the opening moments, looms out of the darkness like Manderley or the Overlook or the setting of a '50s Hammer horror picture. It's a fabulously evocative setting that opens up to reveal shadowy halls, vertiginous stairwells and hypnotic patterned wallpaper, much of it bathed in a faintly greenish hue that could be the light of an exit sign or something more dreamily sinister. (The production design is by Stephane Collonge.)
The English writer-director Joanna Hogg has always excelled at establishing a sense of place, whether it's the stunning island getaway in her 2010 drama, "Archipelago," or the painstaking re-creation of her own 1980s London flat in her superb recent diptych of "The Souvenir" (2019) and "The Souvenir Part II" (2021). If you've seen either of those, you'll recognize Swinton's Rosalind immediately, several years older and with more of a rasp in her voice, though as elegant as ever in dress and manner. You'll also know that Julie, with her invigorating warmth and stylish dark bob of hair, is a stand-in for Hogg herself, and that this curious, unsettling story is to some degree drawn from real life. But if "The Eternal Daughter" is a sequel of sorts to the "Souvenir" movies, it's also a more mysterious kind of cinematic memoir.
