The Eternal Daughter (2022 | UK | 96 minutes | Joanna Hogg)
Joanna Hogg continues to linger in the rich corridors of memory to explore the haunted hallways of sparking creativity that she began with her semi-memoir The Souvenir and revisited with The Souvenir: Part Two. This time, we are treated to a twice the Tilda Swinton as she inherits the role an older Julie, the aspiring young filmmaker from the first films, and reprises the the role of Julie’s mother. As we catch up with Julie she’s firmly established in her career, having packed up a stack of ghost stories to inspire an upcoming project while she spends time with her mother in a remote country estate to celebrate her birthday. Now run as a hotel, albeit underpopulated with other guests, the stately brick manor was once a family home where mom stayed during the Blitz.
One need not have seen the first films, though, to slip into this haunted house where Tilda and Tilda share a small guestroom with their beloved spaniel Louis. Julie has trouble sleeping, awoken by phantom noises of clattering windows, wandering the property after dark, and only occasionally interacting with the sparse staff: an aggressively indifferent front desk clerk / waitress and an overly kindly groundsman. They meet in the evenings for dinner, apparently the only guests on the premises. As their stay unfolds, the mists gather and the wind does its ominous whooshing. Oddities accumulate and we begin to realize what it is that we’re watching. Julie’s a consummate people-pleaser, but who she’s trying to satisfy, when, and why remain a slippery question and one senses, the heart of her art.
The Good Nurse (2022 | USA | 122 minutes | Tobias Lindholm)
Based on a shocking story of unexplained hospital deaths, director Tobias Lindholm makes an odd decision to sideline the true crime elements of this fascinating story of depraved malpractice. Instead he centers the film’s drama on Jessica Chastain’s committed portrayal of the physical and emotional perils imposed by the titular nurse whose diligence and powers of observation helped to crack a terrifying case wide open.
Chastain’s Amy is a seemingly ideal night nurse, a blip of cheerful competence amid an understaffed New Jersey ICU, depicted in a drab industrial color palette of paint and unflattering fluorescent lights. A single mother drained from her tireless overnight shifts, considerable home responsibilities, and the stress of a dangerous (yet undisclosed) medical condition, she’s initially thrilled when a new colleague is hired. Eddie Redmayne plays the soft-spoken and eager-to-help new nurse as somewhere between invisible yet ever-present. He’s immediately helpful in the hospital and quickly integrates himself into Amy’s family life. Further, he quickly becomes complicit in concealing the severe heart problems that Amy has been keeping a secret so that she can establish enough seniority to finally qualify for much-needed medical insurance (this is confusing). As a storytelling mechanism, a protagonist with a metaphorical high heart as well as an actual one that could kill her if she gets too stressed, is not exactly subtle, but sometimes neither is the truth.
When a patient unexpectedly expires overnight, her death is cast as a sad surprise but not overly suspicious. Except that the film immediately undermines any suspense by jumping forward seven weeks to a police investigation that was requested yet resisted at every turn by the hospital. The cop drama is somewhat rote and the detectives seem incapable of solving anything on their own. So we’re left with Amy, her struggles, suspicions, and amateur investigations to point out obvious facts and do all of the heavy lifting. Hers is certainly a heroic story and it’s easy to understand the desire to spotlight the harrowing toll that the risky high pressure decision took. Despite a lot of impressive filmmaking and work from the actors to convey the strains of the job, the creepiness of the killer, and the stress of working under a terrifying realization, something about the structure feels off. While the choice to focus on the emotional toll rather than the mystery of this deeply unsettling case makes some sense under an assumption that the crime, criminal, and modus operandi were so well known from news reports that there’s little point in attempting to conceal them from a well-read audience, it has the effect of deflating some of the thrill of watching as a serial killer is discovered and caught.
All images courtesy TIFF, where The Eternal Daughter and The Good Nurse had their North American and World premieres; all will be released to a wider public later this year.