All in the Family

Gothic is coded posh. Or, to put it another way, gothic is a romantic recuperation of the past in which ruined property represents the decline of a hierarchical order: the bare ruined choirs of an abandoned abbey; the forbidding castle of the absentee landlord. The persistence of social hierarchy, and the contemporary economic importance of property, mean that the gothic is never far from the surface of our culture. Unfortunately, this often gives rise to a fetishisation of the property and an unrealistic, even hysterical, treatment of social relations. A recent example is Emerald Fennell's film, Saltburn, in which a middle-class psychopath destroys an aristocratic family and inherits their country pile. You probably saw that coming a mile off, even without the signposting to Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Two far superior films, with striking similarities in plot but which use the gothic in more varied and imaginative ways, are Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter and Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. Of the two, Hogg's film is the more obvious in the way that it plays with gothic tropes, but it does so precisely to wrong-foot expectations. Haigh's film is more subtle in its use of gothic themes, but that is because its class milieu is very different.

The Eternal Daughter re-uses the upper-middle-class mother and daughter from Hogg's two Souvenir films, Rosalind and Julie, but here both are played by Tilda Swinton. The film opens in suitably gothic style with mist and enveloping darkness as the pair plus dog arrive at a Welsh mansion, now converted to a hotel. The cabbie provides a tale-cum-warning. Naturally, the hotel is all but deserted, the receptionist is sour and unhelpful (she's Welsh and thus coded as resentful and lower class), and there are lots of noises in the night. The purpose of the visit is for some mother and daughter quality time, but it's clear that the relationship though loving is cool, even formal, with polite ministrations substituting for meaningful engagement. It's all very upper middle class in its emotional restraint and acceptance that there is an unbridgeable divide between the generations. There is also a strain of cynicism: Julie is covertly recording her mother's comments as raw material for a screenplay she is writing, which presumably reflects Hogg's own ambivalence about her autofictional approach to filmmaking.

It transpires that the building was one that Rosalind lived in as a young girl during World War II (it was owned by an aunt), and that she carries memories - some nice, some not so nice - of what occured there. Suitably cued, you're expecting something bad to happen and sure enough the dog goes missing. Julie enlists the help of Bill, an enigmatic member of staff, and they search the grounds. The dog then turns up in Julie's room. This is the signal for a tonal shift away from the gothic. Julie shares a drink with Bill, who offers advice on bereavement: Julie has lost her father and Bill his wife. She later hears Rosalind tell Bill that she, Julie, has no children and will thus lack a dutiful daughter to care for her in her old age. The film reaches its climax with a birthday meal for Rosalind at which point we suddenly realise that the reason we never saw both characters in the same shot was not because they're played by the same actress but because Rosalind was never there: she too is dead. Julie is at the hotel on her own, working on a screenplay (presumably this film) and thus conjuring up her mother's ghost. As the film concludes, we realise that the hotel isn't deserted, that the receptionist is solicitous and that the weather is fine. Further confusing expectations, the wise old head Bill turns out to be real, rather than another projection of Julie's psyche. 

A common and recurrent motif in both Hogg's film and Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the protagonist looking out of a window but in a way that suggests they are looking into the past rather than observing the present. Haigh's protagonist is Adam, played by Andrew Scott, a gay screenwriter approaching middle age who not only doesn't have kids but appears to have no friends: they moved out to the suburbs and country to raise families. Like Julie, Adam is in search of his dead parents and struggling to write about them. On a research trip to his modest childhood home in Sanderstead, he encounters a trim man in his 30s with a 'tache. What looks for all the world like a pickup turns out to be a visitation by his 80s-era father who takes him home where he is welcomed by his mother who recognises her now grownup son by his eyes. Just as Julie sought to establish a greater rapport with her mother, so Adam seeks to explain himself to his mum and dad, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. This primarily means coming out to them but it also means expressing what their loss meant to him. They died when he was only 12, after which he was brought up by a granny in Dublin (which explains Scott's accent). 

There's a degree of humour in the generational divide that veers perilously close to a 1970s sitcom, but the real subject is the unbearable weight of a love that cannot now be expressed even if the imaginative encounter with his parents provides the consolation that they would love him just as much now as they did when he was a shy and sensitive child. As with Julie and her mother, not only does Adam conjure his parents' ghosts but he is finally ghosted by them over a meal, in Croydon's Whitgift Centre of all places. The twist in this tale involves Harry, played by Paul Mescal, the only other occupant of Adam's London tower block, who offers human contact and warmth as much as sex, but who is eventually revealed to be another imaginative projection of Adam's mind but, tragically, extrapolated from an all too real person who is also now dead. Adam is lonely - pathologically lonely, adrift in a building that is improbably empty and constantly replaying the queer-coded music of his 80s youth: Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

The difference between the two films reflects the class of the parents and how this has affected the child's understanding of the world. Rosalind's emotional reticence and Julie's instrumentalism have left their relationship transactional. Gestures of care and tokens of memory - Julie's presents for her mother, her mothers stash of photographs - have become the medium of exchange. Honest expressions of feeling are avoided and when Julie's finally burst through they come across as self-pitying and selfish. In contrast, Adam's parents are more emotionally engaged - allowing Adam into their bed, relishing shared joys like dressing the Christmas tree - but their view of the world - dismissing "poofy shit" - was as typical of their day as the easy relationship with drink and cigarettes. Adam's loneliness is rooted in his belief that they could never have understood what he was experiencing as a bullied schoolkid: that he was effectively orphaned before their deaths in a car crash. Their return offers a chance for Adam to convince himself that it wouldn't have mattered: that they would have evolved with the times while continuing to love him for who he was and is.

The property in The Eternal Daughter has been lost to the family. It is now a commercial, and thus a slightly grubby middle-class, concern rather than a gentry family home with all its history of good and bad. Despite the early suggestions of ruin, the Welsh mansion is actually in good condition and a popular hotel. As such, it represents an optimistic view of changing social relations: evolving towards a more democratic if essentially capitalist future. The property in All of Us Strangers is cosy but also empty. Adam never interrupts the present owners of his childhood home. They aren't there just as there is no one, apart from Harry, in the block of well-appointed flats in London where Adam now lives, which feels more like an abandoned spaceship than a slab of prime real estate, an effect heightened by the vivid sunsets that Adam observes from his 22nd floor eyrie. This property is also capitalist but it looks more like an investment: the urban flat as safe deposit box for distant investors; the suburban home as a Thatcherite aspiration now found to be devoid of humanity. 

Gothic fiction is characterised by fear, the supernatural and the demands the past makes on the present. Julie fears a childless old age, Adam a life of loneliness. For both of them the supernatural is less a threat than a device that allows them to commune with the dead: a form of spiritualism for people who don't believe in spirits. The dynamic of both stories sets a time-limit on the past's demands - there is no haunting as such and the ghosts are a friendly as Caspar - and both protagonists come to realise that they must let the past go so that they, rather than the dead, can rest in peace. Both films ultimately supersede the gothic: Hogg's by highlighting the self-indulgence of the aesthetic and letting the light of day in; Haigh's by revealing that terror and inconsolable loss are quotidian emotions that affect us all, not the preserve of a social elite with refined sensibilities. Both are wonderful films. In contrast, the ending of Saltburn, in which Barry Keoghan's character cavorts naked through his newly-acquired palatial home, suggests little more than the masturbatory fantasy of an estate agent as imagined by someone who knows the correct cutlery to use on all occasions.