Middle-aged director Julie returns to the family home where she spent her childhood together with her mother and her dog. It is now a hotel, swept by cold winds and inhabited only by whispers. The women are the only visitors. Celebrating her mother Rosalind’s birthday and hoping to finish the script for her film, the mist slowly reveals what it has been hiding. The two women’s memories collide: while Rosalind remembers the place with a suppressed melancholy, Julie has only experienced the good. Without asking, the past begins to mock the present. 

Some might call cult director Joanna Hogg’s film a Freudian heresy, as she develops the theme of revising the female relationships in a family. Others would call it “Tilda Swinton2”, and still others as encapsulating the metaphor of the mirror image cherished by auteur cinema. The Scottish actress, with whom Hogg became close friends at school, portrays the two main roles of mother and daughter (the scene in which Swinton argues with herself while eating a salad is a must-see!). Hogg tackled a similar relationship in her diptych The Souvenir (2019–2021), in which Swinton plays the mother while her real daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, plays the daughter. The director’s latest film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is a smooth mashup of camp and gothic, with ghostly references to British classics, including Stanley Kubrick’s most polished works.