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During her stay at Soughton Hall, an 18th century Welsh stately home, for the production of her latest film The Eternal Daughter, director Joanna Hogg saw eerie shadows passing under her bedroom door. Her line producer was disturbed by bad dreams. The sound recordist felt a hand touching them through toile de Jouy wallpaper. “We all got a bit frenzied,” says Hogg, who admittedly doesn’t do well with the supernatural. There have been a few tales of Soughton Hall’s spectral presences over the years, hinted at by one of the building’s directors Sarah Ramsbottom. “I’ve heard housekeeping staff talk of things being moved occasionally and something playing tricks on them,” she says, cautious of saying too much for fear of scaring off future guests.

Despite all of this, the location was the perfect atmospheric site for the British director’s venture into ghost story territory for The Eternal Daughter, a haunting and expressive portrait of a daughter reckoning with her relationship to her mother. Across Hogg’s body of work, reflections on her own life have been depicted through space as much as through narrative—for her previous two films The Souvenir Part I and II, for example, the filmmaker and her team recreated the London apartment that Hogg lived in as a film student for the character of Julie, a semi-fictionalized version of the younger Hogg. The Eternal Daughter is another of the director’s films that layers fiction with personal history, drawing on her experiences and memories of her own mother and places that were important to them. “These are places and often they’re places that I knew well before we made a film in them,” Hogg says, bristling slightly at any use of the word “location” to describe her film’s settings. “The starting point is a place that I want to revisit and so they have a very personal resonance.”

For The Eternal Daughter, the director wasn’t attempting to create another replica of a space she once knew but to find somewhere with the right kind of architecture and atmosphere for the gothic narrative she wanted to explore. It was during a “really crude,” as Hogg puts it, Google search for the most haunted houses in the UK that the filmmaker discovered the property. She quickly adds that she didn’t actually want to shoot in the most haunted place she could find—“I’d have been too terrified to do that.” In the film, Tilda Swinton plays both mother Rosalind and daughter Julie, a twisting, metatextual continuation of both her and her real-life daughter Honor Swinton-Byrne’s roles in The Souvenir Part I and II. For Rosalind and Julie in The Eternal Daughter, their visit to Soughton Hall’s fictional counterpart, the Moel Famau Hotel, is both a retreat for Rosalind’s birthday and a chance to revisit what was once her family home. In reality and in the film, the building has undergone several redevelopments and is no longer a domestic property, feeding into the complexity of Hogg’s story and the tension between what the house once meant for Rosalind and the hotel it is now.

Soughton Hall had never been used as a film or television set before—surprising given its striking architectural beauty. The Georgian house was built in 1720 and was later remodeled, a commission given to the architect Sir Charles Barry who would go on to design the Houses of Parliament. The owner at the time was a keen traveler and wanted the house to reflect his interests in Islamic architecture and North African design. As such, while there is a clear British sensibility in the grandeur of the property, details such as the reddish brick, curved windows, and turrets in the landscaped gardens add a compelling internationality. During the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, the hall, now a commercial wedding venue, was left deserted. It was an ideal opportunity then, and a silver lining for Ramsbottom, to use the space for the film. “We normally host 120 or so weddings a year, so filming during any other time would be impossible,” she says. “Whole rooms were being repurposed, one of the bedrooms became a prosthetics room for example. You just couldn’t do that with weddings going on.”

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