Dir: Joanna Hogg. Starring: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade, Ariane Labed, Harris Dickinson, Charlie Heaton, Joe Alwyn. Cert 15, 107 minutes.
In 2019, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir dramatised a doomed romance from the filmmaker’s early adulthood. It starred Honor Swinton Byrne as Hogg’s early Eighties avatar, an aspiring director infatuated by an older and ultimately tragic man. The film was a critical hit, yet polarising: it was either an intimate masterpiece or a navel-gazing exercise in affluent angst. Hogg also seemed to be working through her memories in real time, resulting in a movie so chilly and distant that it often felt impenetrable.
