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The Souvenir

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United Kingdom, United States · 2019
Rated R · 1h 59m
Director Joanna Hogg
Starring Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade
Genre Romance, Mystery, Drama

A quiet film student begins finding her voice as an artist while navigating a turbulent courtship with a charismatic but untrustworthy man. She defies her protective mother and concerned friends as she slips deeper and deeper into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship, which comes dangerously close to destroying her dreams.

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What are people saying?

Chichi Tsai Profile picture for Chichi Tsai

I found this to be very difficult to watch at times. It's an uncomfortably vulnerable film about a young woman who seems to be the last person to realize what is happening to her. Her upper class naivete and her desire to be taken seriously as an artist is at odds with with her relative newness as both a woman in the world and a budding filmmaker. What is going on with her lover is a mystery to nobody except her, but there's a kind of strength in the conviction of her misguided belief that can be beautiful or terrifying in equal measure. I think its a brave movie about a very sheltered girl shot by a very honest older filmmaker. I had high hopes for these films but I didn't connect emotionally to them. I don't think it's a must watch unless you're interested in a kind of artistic coming of age alongside a portrait of a toxic relationship where the love is, if frustrating, at least very earnestly felt.

What are critics saying?

80

CineVue by

As heartbreaking as it is acutely observed, Hogg’s deep-diving autobiographical film is a beautiful, confessional tell-all about the brief joys and enduring tragedy that helped her find her voice as an artist.

100

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

It may have taken Hogg several decades to realize that her own box of darkness was actually a beautiful gift, but she unwraps it with the care and tenderness of someone who understands its true value.

90

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

This is an illuminating (self-)portrait of a young artist as well as a mesmerizing chronicle of a consuming, destructive relationship that steadily inches its way under the viewer's skin.

100

Variety by Guy Lodge

Achingly well-observed in its study of a young artist inspired, derailed and finally strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is at once the coming-of-age story of many women and a specific creative manifesto for one of modern British cinema’s most singular writer-directors.

91

The Film Stage by Jordan Raup

Hogg’s earlier films are striking in their picturesque abstractness as we sit in on conversations from a distance, but the ambition and warmth on display in The Souvenir makes this her greatest achievement.

100

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

If The Souvenir seems to move assuredly to its own unconventional rhythms, it’s because Hogg isn’t telling a straightforward story; she’s showing us, piecemeal, how an artist’s sensibility comes into being.

100

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.

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