One of last year's best films gets its first local screening at the Somerville Theatre

One of last year’s very best films never played at Boston theaters. Despite enthusiastic receptions at the Venice, Toronto and New York Film Festivals as well as the imprimatur of executive producer Martin Scorsese, Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter” — an eerie epilogue to the writer-director’s “Souvenir” series starring Tilda Swinton — was quietly banished to video on demand with bafflingly little fanfare from distributor A24, a company typically far friendlier to art films. Lucky for us, the good folks at the Independent Film Festival Boston are bringing it to the big screen where it belongs, teaming up with the Somerville Theatre to present “Mothers + Daughters: 3 Films by Joanna Hogg and Tilda Swinton,” during which “The Eternal Daughter” will have it’s belated Boston area premiere, followed the next night by a double feature of “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II.”  If you’re not yet acquainted with Hogg’s slow-burn psychodramas, here’s an ideal place to start.

Long acclaimed at home in London, where she’s been working steadily since the 1990s, Hogg didn’t break big in America until she was nearly 60 years old, with 2019’s “The Souvenir.” It’s the semi-autobiographical story of a fresh-faced film student named Julie Hart (played by Honor Swinton Byrne) who falls in love with a dashing, slightly disheveled older gentleman (Tom Burke) who even in the early ‘80s setting seems like a relic washed up from another era. Our young Julia is so naïve it takes her half the movie to realize that his louche, laid-back mannerisms are actually symptoms of a raging heroin addiction, and as he spirals downward Julia clings for support from her repressed, upper-crust mum Rosalind (Tilda Swinton, the actress’ real-life mother) in a touching depiction of how two people can love one another very much without understanding each other at all.

I attended an early Sundance Film Festival screening of "The Souvenir" that was greeted with confused giggles and wry bemusement when the closing credits claimed that “The Souvenir Part II” was coming soon, like the promises of “James Bond will return” or some silly superhero saga. Yet sure enough, two years later, the sequel arrived as advertised, chronicling Julie’s coming of age as a female filmmaker in a field dominated by boorish men, while also reckoning with her British blue-blood background and an aching need to use art to make sense out of tragedy. I liked “The Souvenir” a lot but I liked it even more after seeing “Part II.” The movies complete each other quite satisfyingly, building to a final shot of cheeky, metatextual perfection.

You don’t need to have seen “The Souvenir” films to understand “The Eternal Daughter,” which picks up decades later in the present day, with Tilda Swinton now taking over for her daughter as Julie, while also reprising her role as Rosalind. Originally scripted over a dozen years ago, it was never intended to be a sequel. Yet when Hogg returned to her old draft she couldn’t stop seeing the “Souvenir” characters in those roles, especially as an opportunity for a tale of two Tildas. (Hogg and the actress have been friends since they were ten years old.) But there’s a reason this isn’t called “The Souvenir Part III,” as “The Eternal Daughter” doesn’t look, sound or feel anything like either of the earlier pictures. She’s brought Julie and Rosalind into an entirely different genre.

It's a haunted house movie, sort of. Julie and Rosalind are spending the latter’s birthday weekend at a hotel in a far-off, fog-swept corner of Wales. Howling winds drone endlessly outside, with weird rattles and familiar Bartók stings from “The Shining” punctuating the soundtrack. Julie wants to write a movie about her mother’s life, surreptitiously recording their conversations in the hopes of mining them for material. But everything on their holiday is instantly amiss. The room they reserved is now supposedly unavailable, despite the fact that there don’t appear to be any other guests in the hotel, and Julie’s tightly wound, fastidiously polite requests are falling on the deaf ears of a devastatingly disdainful concierge (played by Carly-Sophia Davies, whose subtle eyerolls may be the film’s scariest special effect.)

The dual Swintons are almost always isolated within their own frames, the actress expertly feigning conversations with herself while the deliberately uncanny cutting highlights the characters' inability to connect. Every assumption Julie makes about her mother turns out to be incorrect — mum's memories of growing up in this manor during wartime aren't exactly warm ones --and the slight disorientation we feel from the two never occupying the same screen space only underscores the psychological gulf between them. “The Eternal Daughter” isn’t a horror movie, but it’s haunted. The gothic trappings aren’t supernatural so much as they’re externalizations of the characters’ regrets. This is a hotel where you bring your own ghosts.

Coming off a movie year defined by maximalism and the epic, go-for-broke expansiveness of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” "White Noise" and (lord help us) “Babylon,” the elegant concision of Hogg’s craft feels like both a blessing and a relief. This is a sad story told simply, with a big twist barely hidden in plain sight. The climax is merely a cut to what we already knew was coming, yet the change in camera angles unleashes a powerful flood of emotions. “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II” are very good films. “The Eternal Daughter” is a great one.

“Mothers + Daughters: 3 Films by Joanna Hogg and Tilda Swinton,” runs at the Somerville Theatre Wednesday, Feb. 8 and Thursday, Feb. 9.