Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II is less a sequel than a drawn-out eulogy for a character we already didn’t care about. It’s a film about filmmaking, which, if we’re being honest, is already a red flag. Nothing says “pretentious detour” like watching a filmmaker make a film about making a film about her feelings. This is what happens when art school never ends and everyone’s too polite to tell the director to just take up journaling.
The film picks up after the not-so-tragic demise of Anthony, Julie’s heroin-addicted lover from the first film. A death that was supposed to leave her devastated but mostly left audiences reaching for the fast-forward button. In Part II, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne, looking perpetually like she just woke up from a nap in a philosophy textbook) decides to make her graduation film about her relationship with Anthony — because what better way to process trauma than to subject a fresh cast of actors to your half-written diary entries?
Watching Julie direct her own heartbreak is like being forced to read someone’s LiveJournal from 2003, except now it’s been converted into a black-box theater performance with public funding. She drifts through rooms, mumbles vaguely to her crew, and stares at herself in mirrors like she’s waiting for a revelation that never arrives. At one point, her idea of bold artistic vision is shooting a scene with colored smoke. Somewhere, Godard wept.
The film traffics in that brand of autobiographical navel-gazing that mistakes inertia for introspection. Julie doesn’t evolve, so much as she molts into a slightly more insufferable version of herself. The performances around her are all superbly restrained — meaning no one seems interested in emoting or raising their voice above a faint whisper. Every character feels like they’re trying not to wake the baby that is British reserve.
And let’s talk about Honor Swinton Byrne. She seems sweet, and I’m sure her godmother’s cat thinks she’s a genius, but this performance is flatter than a Yorkshire pudding left in the rain. She speaks like she’s afraid of interrupting her own internal monologue. In most scenes, she either looks confused, slightly embarrassed, or like she’s trying to remember if she left the oven on.
Richard Ayoade, the film’s only flash of color in an otherwise beige abyss, returns as Patrick — a caricature of a caricature of a camp director, possibly the ghost of Oscar Wilde if he got trapped inside a film reel. He has one brilliant line about not wanting to make a film about himself and thus makes a film about a woman who’s “not him.” It’s the only self-awareness in the entire movie, and it’s buried in a glitter bomb of sarcasm that vanishes almost instantly. We’re then dragged back into Julie’s therapy masquerading as cinema.
There’s a film within the film, naturally, and it’s as excruciating as you’d expect: actors struggling through dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone trying to pass a poetry exam with only five minutes and an open wound. The set is full of nervous techies and confused performers all wondering if the script is supposed to be bad or if they’re just the collateral damage of Julie’s healing process.
The real problem with The Souvenir Part II is that it thinks it’s more profound than it is. It bathes in silence, wallows in pauses, and lingers in doorways like a ghost too bored to haunt. Every scene screams, “Look how sensitive and broken I am,” but the emotion never reaches the surface. It’s like trying to cry underwater — technically possible, but mostly just a weird experience for everyone involved.
There are long, meandering scenes where Julie stares off into space or talks to friends about ideas that lead nowhere. Conversations vanish into abstraction like smoke from a cigarette smoked ironically. Nobody seems to have a job, but everyone has an opinion about art. These are the kind of people who drink black coffee, not because they like it, but because it makes them feel tragic.
Hogg’s direction is, as always, formally composed — which is to say, each frame is carefully arranged like an art gallery exhibit you can’t afford and wouldn’t want in your house anyway. It’s all mirrors, open doors, and muted color palettes. The camera doesn’t move unless someone’s standing still, and even then it seems reluctant, as if it too is questioning whether this scene is necessary.
The whole affair feels like a highbrow resurrection of the Tumblr era, where everything is filtered through a haze of soft regret and overanalysis. At one point, Julie asks, “How do I make this film?” and it’s played like a deep existential question, when the real answer is, “With great difficulty and no audience.”
There’s no real dramatic arc. No climax. No catharsis. Just endless reverence for melancholy. If The Souvenir was about the pain of being manipulated by a heroin addict, Part II is about the pain of trying to squeeze meaning out of a half-finished art project. The stakes are as low as Julie’s voice. Her emotional growth could be measured in millimeters. And the pacing? Let’s just say if you started this film while boiling an egg, that egg would be a fossil by the end.
And let’s not pretend that this is a universal experience. This isn’t grief we can all relate to. This is extremely specific, painfully posh grief — the kind that comes with an estate, a trust fund, and a film school application. There’s a whole sequence where Julie films a surreal version of her own heartbreak in a dreamlike studio. For most people, grieving means therapy, crying in your car, and watching garbage television. For Julie, it means re-staging her sadness like she’s directing a perfume ad for existential dread.
Final Verdict:
The Souvenir Part II is less of a movie and more of a slow exhalation. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone read their diary aloud while painting their nails and sipping lukewarm tea. A beautiful-looking, meticulously framed, soul-sucking slog through the world’s longest breakup. Joanna Hogg may be a master of subtlety, but subtlety only works when there’s something under the surface. Here, there’s just mist. And regret. And a thousand yards of unspooled 16mm film soaked in privilege.
