The Souvenir (2019) User Reviews

Mixed Feelings

[tofualicia · 7/10 · 8 January 2020]

Being in love has this cunning way of tricking your brain into seeing no flaw in the person you're fixated upon. When people around you scream "dump him!", you turn a blind eye and convince yourself that the person you love is not the monster they say he is. The person you love will always be the most charming and kind, even when they're not.

The Souvenir tells a story about a privileged film student who involves herself in an intense relationship with a shady older man, who is full of charisma.

I can definitely see why this film is getting mixed ratings. The pacing was rather slow and the story was under-dramatized. I see a lot of reviewers really disliking this film due to the unbearable toxic romance between the two characters. I mean, I can somewhat agree. Seriously, just break up already! But sometimes relationships are just... like that. People often stay in toxic situations even if they can clearly see the red flags. People cling on to the slightest glisten of hope when everything is falling apart. As they say, it really... do be like that.

I loved the cinematic direction they took in this film. I felt like I was looking into the memories of the protagonist. The faded dream-like colour scheme really pulls the film together. I was really lured into the soft pastel universe that was created on screen. Did I mention how much I loved the cinematics?

What I couldn't see past was how unlikeable Julie and Anthony are. Julie is a privileged film student that tries really hard to be interesting, and Anthony is this pretentious, manipulative douchebag of a person. I just can't seem to find any redeeming qualities in the characters, which makes it hard for me to fully connect with this story. But maybe this film wasn't made for the viewer to be connected to any of the characters. Maybe this film was made to be consumed as what it is. A naive girl falling in love with a secretive older man.

Nevertheless, The Souvenir really made me sit and ponder about the film a lot. I'm still processing the emotions I've felt throughout the film and that should be enough for me to give it a good enough rating. I just wish it could've resonated with me in a stronger way.

Hey Why Don't You Come Over & Watch Our Vacation Slides

[deager · 5/10 · 18 June 2019]

Let me get this out of the way first - just because Tom Burke, Honor Swinton Byrne & Tilda Swinton do a excellent job (the reason for a 5 & not a 3) in this movie (even though Tilda Swinton is little used) doesn't mean that its great. The cinematography is good (though a bit washed out, but that could be on purpose based on the total lack of tension in this movie, so why have anything but pastel hues?); the direction I found to very good (even though Joanna Hogg, working from her own script) loves wide framing that seems to collapse on close encounters. The script though is just a lot of talking, talking, talking that seems to be leading us nowhere. Scene after scene of conversation that is all very nice but has little purpose. The only person who has anything interesting or useful is Anthony (Tom Burke). Julie (Honor Swinton Burke) seems to be so unaware that it gets very tedious watching her sleepwalk through this mess. (I have yet to understand the title "The Souvenir" as it relates to the story. I give guesses but the might be spoilers) This movie is like being with friends & having a nice evening (The reviews &Trailers for this movie) and then just as you open the second bottle of wine they stand up and say now let's go to the den so we can show you the slides of our vacation to the Kansas & Nebraska Prairie! (The movie starts!) (No offense to the great states of Kansas & Nebraska, but you are flat!). This movie builds no tension between its characters, it does nothing but shows a day in the life of a slick, maneuvering man & a woman who has no sense of the world around her & is a prime enabler. Is it about her blind love for him. Is it about his manipulation of her. Is it about her lack of knowledge of...of...well basically everything. I kept hoping this movie would do something, would go somewhere, would show us something that we could care about (especially regarding Julie) but it never did, it just kept wandering and wandering to the expected conclusion with a closing shot (reminiscent of the final shot on The Searchers, although I am sure it was not on purpose). As you read all the glowing reviews about the acting, etc. I would say 2 things - 1. All that great acting, cinematography, even directing doesn't mean squat without a script that means something and 2. They said that the English Patient was a great movie too!

Disappointing and over-rated

[proud_luddite · 5/10 · 23 July 2019]

Based on a true story: in the 1980s, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a young British woman from a wealthy family and attending film school. She hooks up with Anthony (Tom Burke) who gradually takes advantage of her while trying to hide his serious personality flaws and habits.

Swinton Byrne does not, in any way, give a bad performance; in fact, it is rather good. But she lacks the depth and subtlety required to carry the main role in a two-hour movie. Adding to the trouble is Burke whose Tom is as bland as kale and as common as a condo construction project in downtown Toronto. This character is so lacking in charisma and charm that the film becomes an unintentional mystery as the viewer is left to wonder what Julie could possibly see in him with or without his shortcomings.

A sad irony is a scene in the film in which a film teacher explains that "Psycho" was a success as most scenes were normal, thus making its abnormal, frightening scenes stand out more. If only writer/director Joanna Hogg had followed the advice that she had written for one of her secondary characters. While the narrative of "The Souvenir" is consistent, it does not have any scene that stands out, making it long and dull.

A saving grace was the presence of Tilda Swinton (Swinton Byrne's real-life mother) portraying Julie's mother - emphasis on the word 'presence' which was missing in the primary performances. The film would have benefited with more scenes that included Swinton Senior.

"The Souvenir" is hyper-praised in the most baffling of ways by most critics. One of the praises is that it's based on a true story. Well, there are billions of true stories that don't make good films. Sadly, "The Souvenir" is one of them. - dbamateurcritic

Disquieting, slightly aloof drama about a poisonous relationship

[PotassiumMan · 7/10 · 20 May 2019]

Honor Swinton Byrne gives a profoundly subtle performance as an impressionable film student from a privileged upbringing who becomes romantically involved with an enigmatic, charming man who works for the British government. Tom Burke is a stark presence as the young woman's muse. They gradually become inseparable.

She is a thoughtful, sensitive person who soon finds herself navigating the pitfalls of his serpentine personality. The film proceeds at a very deliberate pace and is low-key to the point of being catatonic at times. The main criticism of this film is that its slow patches do go on for quite a bit. But out of this dry and methodical narrative eventually emerges a raw tension leading to a conclusion that is quite powerful.

Although this isn't quite the masterpiece that many reviews have made it out to be, I found it a worthwhile and subtly rewarding cinematic experience. Recommended to patient viewers.

I had to "solve" this film, but it was worth it.

[Gilly-13 · 8/10 · 24 October 2019]

Like many, I was bored and confused after viewing "The Souvenir", but I had recently watched and liked Joanna Hogg's "Unrelated" (2007), so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought it over. Like some other reviewers, something came to me the next day. I'm not a "feeling" kind of guy, so I have to work to appreciate her method of getting across an emotional complex and the way she will use the whole film to lead to a pinpoint, deep-drill moment of emotional elucidation. In "The Souvenir", I came to think she was portraying Julie as a sort of emotional vampire, vicariously using the troubled life of her lover, Anthony, to fill in the blanks of her previously vapid, upper-middle-class existence--borrowing some misery to give her enough empathy to be able to relate to less fortunate beings in order to fulfill her artistic ambition to be a filmmaker. The hints are there: her frustrated attempt at a working-class documentary; the advice from more than one source, to work from her own experience--the thing she lacks; her insincere credulity at finding needlemarks on Anthony's arm (you were right, nobody is THAT naive), and again when her flat is ransacked; her blind eye to where he goes with the money he borrows from her--an employee of the British foreign office borrowing constantly from a no-income film student. It occurred to me that this was the reason Joanna Hogg gave Honor Swynton Byrne her journals and materials from that time instead of a script in order to keep the actress as naive and unaware of her own motives as Hogg, herself, must have been at that age in this semi-autobiographical study. Then there was the extended discussion of the murder scene in "Psycho". The iconic portrayal of a brutal stabbing without any depiction of the actual physical violence. Julie says little, but has the last word in the discussion, (from memory) "You don't see the actual killing, but you see the end result." Congruently, you don't see Anthony's death, but the end results: the news of his overdose in the bathroom of an art gallery and the lack of remorse on Julie's part, contrasted with the excellent expression of grief by Tilda Swynton, the enormously talented mother of the character, as well as the actress,. And then the solution came to me when I rememberd the "Joanna Hogg moment"--that magnificent shot where Swynton Byrne turns her concentration from directing a film--the attainment of her film student goal--and glares impassively, directly, and most un-naively into Joanna Hogg's camera. Now, we all knew that was meant to be very cinematically significant, but I honestly didn't understand the significance until I solved the rest of the movie--that final, unblinking glare at the audience was Julie saying, "Yeah, I'm an upper class brat, and I got what I wanted. TFB if my junkie boyfriend died." And that realization with the memory of the defiant glare from her pallid, emotionless face made my blood run cold just as my mail carrier plucked the DVD from my mailbox the next day. I won't watch it again, but I recommend that the bored and confused give it some reconsideration.

Shockingly anti-climatic

[loveblackpoem · 6/10 · 28 May 2019]

Quite early on I could tell what was going on in the film. I even had a guess at what the end would be. Despite this, I continued watching expecting more, something big, something shocking and I never really got it. The director does a great job at showing the ins and outs of a toxic relationship, however, it's just not enough.

Another Hogg-fest

[paul2001sw-1 · 4/10 · 30 January 2022]

Another film from Joanna Hogg brings another portrait of emotionally repressed, deeply unhappy members of the upper middle classes. To make things worse, the film relies on the over-familliar trope of the struggles of a would-be artist (the most boring of all subjects for an artist to consider), in this case a young woman contemporary to the director and with an apparent aspiration to become a Hogg-like film-maker. In places the film seems to acknowlege the inherent ridiculousness of its protagonist; but she recieves a sympathetic treatment. Hogg's style is frankly bizarre: the opposite of melodramatic, she prefers to show her characters going quielty about their business in the aftermath of unseen trauma. Even the wider structure of the film seems (deliberatley) artless, things happen (mostly offscreen) but there's no attempt to construct a plot in the orthodox sense, to manipulate the sequence of events to create a well-paced story. In general, I hate Hollywood blockbusters with their predictable narrative arcs, and love a good piece of miserablism; but the director has to meet me half-way. In fact, although I was profoundly irritated for the film's first half, I found the remainder more watchable than Hogg's two previous movies. But the basic subject (naive woman whose boyfriend is a heroin addict) was covered with far more wit and perception by Rachel Cusk in her first novel 'Saving Agnes', without the same level of underlying self-regard.

Stuck with Me Despite Many Flaws

[evanston_dad · 8/10 · 8 November 2019]

I was prepared to hate this movie based on all of the descriptions of it as nothing more than a tedious chronicle of a toxic relationship. But while those descriptions aren't inaccurate, I found there to be more to it than that, and though I can admit that this movie had many flaws, it kind of got into my head and stuck with me.

I usually have no patience with people, though in movies it's most frequently women, who allow themselves to be treated like dirt by those around them. But in this movie, I understood the dynamic and could see why this particular woman falls into the relationship trap she does. She's had a posh, cushy upbringing and doesn't have much life experience. She wants to be a filmmaker, and the advice she keeps getting is to make movies about what she knows. But she doesn't know anything, and therefore doesn't have anything to make movies about. Enter a troubled heroin addict, which for many in the relationship world is shorthand for "emotionally complicated," and suddenly she's got stories to tell in the locker room. She's a little bit drawn to the drama, even if most of her knows that it's making her miserable and that she should run for the hills.

Now why she's drawn to this particular guy we don't know and aren't told. She doesn't know he's a heroin addict when she first starts dating him, so she's not drawn in by the danger of that. He's got a cosmopolitan air about him and a disdainful attitude that could pass as intellectual to someone who doesn't know better. But he's a drip. Though she's a drip too, so if the shoe fits. The whole film is a bit drippy, actually. There's a gloomy pall over the whole thing that never lifts. It apparently is largely autobiographical, but writer/director Joanna Hogg makes the mistake so many filmmakers do when telling very personal stories. She lived this, or something like it, so she doesn't need context in order to understand it. But we didn't live it, so we don't inherently understand it, and we do need context, else why should we care about these people who are total strangers to us when we first meet them?

However, like I said toward the beginning of this review, despite all of its flaws, there is something about this movie that lingered in my head. I'm not sure I ever really cared about the characters or what happened to them, but I did admire the formal aspects of the film, and I appreciated that Hogg doesn't really ask us to care about her characters. She just presents them as they are, and it's up to us to decide how we feel about them. According to the end credits, there is a sequel coming. I don't know that I'll be rushing out to see that, but I would recommend this one.

Grade: A-

Meh

[maclock · 10 July 2019]

While I'm normally a fan of this kind of production, The Souvenir did very little to draw me in. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I didn't find it to be all that compelling or engaging. I wouldn't go out of my way to see this film if I were you.

Okay but Somewhat Disappointing Drama

[bastille-852-731547 · 6/10 · 24 May 2019]

As much as I enjoy the better-quality summer blockbusters, I also really appreciate good independent films in the summer as a welcome and refreshing alternative to all the franchise movies and explosions. With that in mind as well as this film's terrific reviews, I was hoping that "The Souvenir" would be an excellent film. Sadly, I was let down. While the film certainly isn't bad, it has enough flaws to make it seem a bit empty at times.

The film tells the story of a young film student (Honor Swinton Burke) who begins to fall in love. (I won't say anything else to avoid giving something away.) The film is impressive on a technical level, with strong cinematography and superb production design. Sounds are mixed well throughout the film's duration, and the film's understated editing is very well done. Unfortunately, the character development of the male lead is almost nonexistent, which really damages the movie as a whole. It's a very "cold" movie emotionally, which can work in some films where the characters' emotions are not on the front burner. But for a romantic drama that expects the viewer to care about its two leads, this stoic tone is both jarring and understatedly erratic. While Swinton Burke is fine in the lead role, and some of the short scenes discussing her interest in filmmaking are interesting enough, her performance is rather flat. Tilda Swinton is terrific (as always,) but she is very sadly wasted and given very minimal screen time. While the film's cinematography is often very good, it can also be repetitive. For example, just how many shots of the front of opening and closing elevator doors are in this movie? If you have to start thinking about that while watching the movie after the first several, then there are too many. I also believe the film would have been better if it had a score. I was really hoping to love this movie given how great the trailer and reviews from critics were, but I was left a bit disappointed. 6.5/10

Longest two hours of my life

[avasikhye · 3/10 · 15 June 2019]

I was so genuinely bored while watching this movie that I found myself checking the time on my phone constantly throughout. The movie tries to give you a taste of the everyday life of a young woman in film school who is juggling her work and older boyfriend who happens to be an addict, however it is unbearably dreary and dull. The main character is boring and has no defining personality other than being a pushover film student, and her catering to her manipulative boyfriend does not encourage any sympathy. This movie is basically a vignette of nothing happening.

late to the party

[herronadamj · 10/10 · 16 February 2020]

Just watched this after seeing it appear on many "best of" lists for 2019.

I found it spellbinding.

Some comments:

• The director seems to have gone out of her way to do stuff that doesn't work - but it does - people talking off screen, shots not properly focussed etc.
• The script was like real life - mumbling, people talking over each other, lots of ums and incoherence - we are so attuned to snappy interactions in most scripts that we forget how unreal most dialogue is in what we watch
• The parents were remarkable characters - so carefully written, and beautifully performed
• It captured gloriously the daggy early 80's - the earnestness and the idealism
• The sets / art direction were probably the highlight - for example, the way the camera used the mirrors in their flat to express a range of emotional states
• Some sumptuous tableau cinematography, particularly in the restaurant scenes; reminded me of Peter Greenaway's work
• The use of period music as a coda between sections - whilst in the majority of scenes there was no music at all, which meant the actors needed to do all the work
• The performances were uniformly excellent - particularly Honor Swinton Burke who was translucent in her vulnerability
• As a final point, loved the cameos by the jadied marxist academics sucking on their cigarettes as they planned the revolution which never came

I admit to being pretentious, and as such found this exceptional. We should treasure the fact that films like this are still being attempted - whether or not you liked it.

Sequel bait.

[Pjtaylor-96-138044 · 6/10 · 21 November 2019]

'The Souvenir (2019)' plays out like a series of memories, a highlight reel of a distinct period in its protagonist's life. This is perhaps fitting considering that it's based on director Hogg's own past, playing out almost as a kind of catharsis for the emotional turmoil she underwent while in film school. It's nontraditional but considered. There's very little exposition, aside from when there's an overt amount of it, and we're often dropped into the middle a scene without any real context, left to piece together the plot through snippets of dialogue. It almost feels as though the thing is taking place to someone we know but aren't close to; we only understand what we see and we only see what we understand. The movie is relatively distant in this regard - although, the viewing experience is always active. It struggles to provoke a deep connection because we aren't really allowed to get close to anyone. Still, the affair is usually engaging. It isn't a masterpiece but it's always well-crafted and often enjoyable. It's a rather complex look at a complex relationship, subtly painting its characters in eventually fairly vivid colours. However, it does start to wear thin after a while, with a slow pacing that sees it drag towards its end. There also isn't a huge sense of escalation, even if the flick ends exactly when it should. It's a definitive narrative so the fact that it's apparently getting a sequel is rather strange. I'd still watch it, though. 6/10

Snoozefest

[almiraomerovic · 2/10 · 19 April 2020]

This was one of those films that I was so ready to like, but I just really didn't, and I felt kind of gaslit by all the glowing reviews.

It was gorgeously, wonderfully shot, and I did pick up on the intricacies of the romance and I did enjoy the poignance of the ending. My main problem was that everyone was just so unlikeable. I found it incredibly hard to relate to anyone, especially the two main characters. I never once picked up on anything that Antony did that made him worthwhile to be around; he was simply pompous and awful. Is that the point? Sure, maybe but even in those brief moments where he was 'ok' he was still so dreadful as a person that it couldn't possibly outshine anything so much as it weighed down his nauseating character even more.

Julie was one of my least favorite portrayals of 'the artist' in media recently. If this is the type of person who exemplifies the struggles of the artist, God help us as a species because there will be nothing produced worth remembering. I never got a sense of drive whatsoever, that she ever even wanted to be producing art - it all felt like another dollop of privilege on top of what she already had. Sure, the film pointed that out, but they didn't do anything about it. All of her classmates seemed more preoccupied with art than she did, and that made them more compelling in their brief turns on screen. In stories about artists there are layers - the way their real-world emotional and social lives and relationships inform and intertwine with the art they produce can make for engaging narratives, as revelations can come in many forms. But what are we to make of a character, then, who is an artist, but seems to not think about art at all? Are we supposed to align with and see suffering in the 'tortured artist' even when it seems she couldn't care less about art? I couldn't help but feel like Julie's overwhelming disagreeability, lack of motivation, and her general petty issues were a massive miss for the concept of a female filmmaker on screen in the current day and age. Films about making films aren't always hits, but when they are, it's because they are coursing with passion, which I just did not feel here at all.

I'll be honest, I was a little shocked by how much I disliked this film. It's rare for me to have such a negative reaction, especially about something that on the surface seems so up my alley. Part of me wonders what I missed here, because obviously the rest of the educated film world loved it. But what is it? I was prepared to relate to the characters. I went to film school, know people like Antony and Julie. I know people who are addicts and swing back and forth between emotions that make them hard to predict and harder to live with. I know people who are stuck in relationships that seem so obvious when you're on the outside. All of these people are exciting, interesting, fun to be around, tragic and frightening in their own ways. They feel real,but no one in this film, to me, even barely approached feeling real, and the narrative crumbled as soon as I realized it.

Horrendous

[Gordon-11 · 4 August 2019]

This film tells the story of a film student who has an unreliable boyfriend.

Just five minutes in, I already found the film very boring. There is little story. Even if there was a story, it was told in a really boring way. There were shots that meant nothing, such as the guy going into the kitchen scrubbing, or Tilda Swinton going into the kitchen seemingly to work on the oven. These scenes told nothing, and weren't followed up. Scenes were mostly static, and the contents were very mundane. I found it horrendous.

The devil is not so black as he is painted

[silent88uk · 7/10 · 16 September 2019]

In my humble opinion, the devil is not so black as he is painted, i.e. those numerous 1/10 reviews on here. If you can relate to toxic relationships or been in one, you will appreciate that aspect of the movie, how painfully accurately it's been conveyed.

welcome another talented Swinton

[ferguson-6 · 8/10 · 16 May 2019]

Greetings again from the darkness. Viewers of writer-director Joanna Hogg's semi-autobiographical feature will likely be divided into two distinct groups: those who find it to be a beautifully artistic psychological study, and those who find it to be a painfully slow watch. Fortunately, most who would fall into the latter group will likely skip it altogether, and we can only hope those in the first group will seek it out and encourage similar-minded film fans to attend. Surely both groups can agree that it features a terrific breakout lead performance from Honor Swinton Byrne (daughter of Tilda Swinton).

Ms. Swinton-Byrne stars as Julie, a young London film school student. She's soon drawn to Anthony (Tom Burke), an odd man who is somehow simultaneously laid back and condescending. Their relationship builds as he works some vague job at the Foreign Office, and giving every indication that something's not quite right. Many moments of normal life are shown; however we soon learn that Anthony is a master manipulator, and his off-handed requests for 'a tenner' or sticking Julie with a restaurant tab go deeper than being a simple jerk. We know heartbreak is coming for her; we just don't know how when or how hard.

Tilda Swinton (a long-time friend of director Hogg) appears in a few scenes as Julie's mom, and as you would expect, she perfectly captures the mother-daughter dynamics. Of course Julie is a film student struggling to make ends meet, but with her frequent requests for 'mom loans' coinciding with the Anthony relationship, mother knows best. Jean-Honore Fragonard's 18th century painting gives the film its title, and provides a terrific scene with Julie and Anthony.

Later, when Anthony tells Julie, "You're inviting me to do this to you", we recognize this is an abusive relationship similar to those many women have endured. Set in the 1980's, a doomed relationship looks eerily similar regardless of the era. The film serves as an example of how we sit in judgment of the love lives of others, while often remaining blind (or is it hopelessly optimistic) to our own relationship issues.

Ms. Hogg shot on film and there are some memorable shots throughout - especially within Julie's apartment. There is a recurring split-screen shot where a wall divides what we see in the kitchen with what's happening in the living area - we see characters on each side. This is the anti-Marvel movie. No special effects. No superheroes. And the only worlds in peril are those of average, flawed people like us.

There is a segment involving an analysis of Hitchcock's PSYCHO, and it's clear director Hogg learned lessons about what not to show. There is also a reference to another Hitchcock classic with the tailored grey suit Tom buys for Julie and their trip to Venice. Alfonso Cuaron scored big with ROMA, a very intimate look at his personal life, and filmmaker Hogg's film is in that same vein. It's extremely well made and beautiful to look at, and is likely to be quite challenging for viewers. The payoff comes after much patience and effort and investment into figuring out these characters. It's an arthouse film with improvised dialogue (bonus points for Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out with Him?"). This was a grand jury prize winner at Sundance, and the sequel is already in production ... good news for some of us, while inexplicable to others.

slow big reveal steady decline

[SnoopyStyle · 6/10 · 29 December 2019]

Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a film student in 80's England. She is desperate to make her film and has to borrow money constantly from her mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton). Her boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) is not always supportive and is hiding a big dark secret.

The first half is rather slow. It's basically watching a bad couple going about their day. She's hesitant and he's a jerk. Neither are totally compelling or appealing. There is a big reveal in the middle and then it's slow steady decline to the end. It's not the most thrilling of personal dramas. The style is naturalistic with a fly-on-the-wall sensibilities. It's very arthouse and rather slow most of the time. In the end, this is all about getting a first look at actress Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda Swinton. She has the same alabaster skin. She doesn't have her mother's alien look. She's like a sadder and more pensive version of her mother. Her reserved nature makes it harder to fill the screen with her personality. This role doesn't help. I'd be interested in her stretching out her acting chops more with another director. She should be glad if she follows the same paths as Meryl Streep's daughters. She needs to show more and in this movie, she only has a few big acting moments.

Self-Indulgent Garbage

[robmar-74909 · 1/10 · 10 June 2019]

I had high hopes based on capsule reviews I read, but this is an awful film. Why should anyone care about a self-destructive junkie who has had every advantage in his life and a fool who is a hopelessly romantic enabler? The one redeeming feature is that the cinematography is good. But it doesn't help the story. I assume it is somewhat autobiographical. How sad. It is absolutely dreadful!

One of the Best Movies of 2019

[oguzali1996 · 9/10 · 11 January 2020]

The story goes deeper and deeper every scene with a great structure. Tranquility of the movie tells more about characters and how to perceive the world of the movie. It is like fragment of memories from the past which gives the character one of the biggest emotional pain of her life so it is basically a coming-of-age story. There is much to tell but you should watch it. I did not realize the movie was that much good until the end then I couldn't stop thinking the movie for a long time.

Talent wasted in this masochist's delight

[Red-125 · 6/10 · 16 September 2019]

The Souvenir (2019) is an English movie written and directed by Joanna Hogg.

The movie stars Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie--a young, privileged film student, Tom Burke as Anthony, who works for the British Foreign Service. Tilda Swinton has a supporting role as Rosalind, Julie's mother. (Swinton is Honor Swinton Byrne's mother in real life as well.)

All three actors are excellent, but the plot is hard to swallow. (OK--director Hogg says this is semi-autobiographical about someone she met when she was in film school. That's hard to swallow as well.)

Tom Burke's character is easy to spot as someone with whom you don't want your daughter to fall in love. However, neither mother nor daughter appear to notice. (No one notices that he's never actually at work in the Foreign Service Office either.) Julie is madly, totally in love with him. It's painful to watch.

We saw this movie on the small screen, where it worked as well as it would in the theater. For me, it didn't work at all. The only reason I even gave it a 6.0 is because of Tilda Swinton, who makes her tiny role appear important. The IMDb rating is a weak 6.6. My thought was, "Joanna Hogg, Hilda Swinton and her daughter--how bad could it be?" Now I know.

Dull

[ThomasDrufke · 4/10 · 31 August 2019]

I'm always wary about films with a huge discrepancy between critics and audience reactions, mostly because it typically means a film is either considered pretentious or dumb-fun. That's just the reality of current hollywood. The Souvenir is a movie that you experience more as a spectator from afar rather than something you feel any sort of intimate connection to. It feels like the audio is intentionally hard to dissect, with some scenes either cutting mid conversation or beginning towards the end of one without any sort of context. Which can certainly be a good thing if you're into that sort of filmmaking. I respect anyone's opinion that found Jennifer Kent's direction to be moving and impactful. But I unfortunately found the film to be dull and lacking in personality. For a similar story but better in execution, see 2017's 'Beast'.

4.7/10

People, this is just Part 1!

[ScorchJ · 9/10 · 19 November 2019]

I saw a lot of complaints about the anti-climactic(?) ending, but Nymphomaniac Part 1 for example had an abrupt one too. Is it necessary that every movie/episode to be a shot of adrenaline until the next part/episode comes out? have a little patience and wait for the sequel...

Having said that, this movie has EXCELLENT cinematography (amazing colors, great scenery and still frames), REALISTIC (finally) dialogues which you rarely see in movies, plus, it communicates effectively (aka by SHOWING LACONICALLY) what it is to be in a codependent and therefore toxic relationship and its severe implications.

I can understand not finding the subject particularly interesting or engaging (part of the reason I didn't rate it 10/10), but it's a movie, it's cinema at the end of the day... If those things I mentioned above are not enough to like a film, i don't know what will be.

Honest in its portrayal of an addictive relationship

[tilokaudaman · 7/10 · 22 May 2019]

I found THE SOUVENIR to be a brutally honest protrayal of a toxic relationship. It depicts the rolls both partners play in the development of an addictive process. It is beautifully acted and intelligently directed. It is well worth seeing.

OK, dysfunctional relationships are complex and negative - WE GET IT!!

[icangetthis · 2/10 · 25 February 2020]

I had high hopes for this film, partially because T. Swindon was involved.

What a disappointment.

I appreciate the idea that the actors are improvising a great deal, and because of that it creates very 'real/authentic' type interactions. That's about the only positive thing I can find to say about this film.

It just goes on and on.

It's called 'editing' - give it a try! You could easily just delete the majority of the scenes from this film without having much effect on it's affect, intensity or appeal.

I realize that it's based on the director's past, but come on - just because it's important to you, doesn't mean that anyone else will benefit from seeing this portrayed on film. In my opinion, it isn't exceptional or very original, or entertaining, or important in any way.

I have no idea who the director feels will benefit from (or enjoy watching) this film. I'm stumped.

Sadly, I have to be honest - it's one of the least impactful or interesting films I've ever seen.