IN HER POEM “Flare,” Mary Oliver writes about grief and the relationship between memory and reality, especially when it comes to parents. She writes: “My mother / was the blue wisteria, / my mother / was the mossy stream out behind the house, / my mother, alas, alas, / did not always love her life, / heavier than iron it was / as she carried it in her arms, from room to room.”
Our relationships with parents are shaped by our memories, what parents tell us about their lives, and what we come to understand about them. The Bible tells us to honor our father and mother, but we can never do that perfectly because we never fully know them. This becomes more poignant when those who raised us are no longer around.
Like Oliver’s poem, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (available on video on demand) captures this liminal, lonely feeling in an intensely personal way. Hogg’s semi-autobiographical film is a ghost story about memory, family, and the pull between the stories we know, the ones we don’t, and unresolved ways they differ.
Filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton) is preparing a project about her mother Rosalind (also Swinton). To celebrate Rosalind’s birthday, they travel to a reportedly haunted manor house-turned hotel where Rosalind lived as a child during World War II. It proves a difficult trip.
Julie struggles with an unhelpful desk clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies) and strange nighttime noises. She feels guilt over mining Rosalind’s life for her work as Rosalind recounts memories related to the house, the saddest of which Julie didn’t previously know. Julie’s anxiety intensifies as Rosalind’s birthday nears, leading to a revelation that casts the film’s events in a different light.
Hogg visualizes Julie’s story by evoking the dense fog and eerie color palette — gray, blue and an off-putting arsenic green — of Hammer Film Productions’ classic British horror movies. There are hints of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca in the manor setting, and Vertigo in the film’s shifting depiction of identity. The hotel’s remote quiet and Julie’s creative block harken back to The Shining.
Those references, coupled with the film’s conversations about loss — of a spouse, a pregnancy, a family member — turn The Eternal Daughter into a cinematic expression of Oliver’s poem, moving from the experience of grief as “a misery, and a terror” to, ultimately, “Rise up from the stump of sorrow.”
Hogg’s film is a moving reminder that the process of grief is unique to each person and universal. Memory, and the emotions we tie to it, is a ghost we can’t exorcize. We can, however, be honest with ourselves and with God about the source of our sorrow and learn to live with those feelings. As Oliver puts it, “Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.”
Abby Olcese is a freelance film critic and writer based in Missouri. You can find her on Twitter @abbyolcese.
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