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.
Intriguingly, its sequel is the complete inverse. Rather, it is a tender, sprawling drama that feels less inert than its predecessor and far more compelling. Think of it as The Godfather Part II of posh misery, a film built upon the emotional wreckage left behind from the original, yet wider in scope, smoother in execution, and with warmth where a freezer used to be.
This time around, Swinton Byrne’s Julie is immersed in a detective story. It’s been a few weeks since the death of her older boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke), who succumbed to his secret heroin habit at the climax of the first film. She spends her days in bed, roaming the Norfolk broads near her parents’ home, and asking leading questions. She wants to know whether her mother (a scrappy, earnest Tilda Swinton and Byrne’s real-life mum) ever liked Anthony, and whether she saw anything in him that she herself overlooked.
Later, Julie begins shooting her graduation project at film school, an autobiographical tale of – ahem – an aspiring director infatuated by an older and ultimately tragic man. Her actors pester her with questions: Is it believable that she didn’t know about the drug use? Did he hold all the power in the relationship? The actor playing Anthony (Harris Dickinson) tries to understand his character’s behaviour, since Julie’s script isn’t providing the answers he needs. It describes the “idea” of a man, he says, rather than the truth of him.
All of this is oddly immersive. Hogg contrasts artistic process with the process of becoming an adult, and how both often feel like the same directionless dig to somewhere. Even within Hogg’s potentially exhausting metatextual loop-de-loop – an actor playing her, directing actors playing her – the film’s focus stays on the easily relatable. Julie’s post-Anthony journey is full of disappointing flings and dashed romance; her day-to-day life is an endless navigation of how to exist in the world. She isn’t the naive waif she seemed to become when she was with Anthony, but she’s also still learning how to speak up for herself and grapple with the egos of others.
As an actor, Byrne feels more at ease this time around. It might also be the absence of Burke that helps. Anthony’s death leaves behind a void that Hogg fills with colour and spark; Julie becomes less of a cipher as a result. Similarly, her friends and associates become more layered, and there is a lovely weight to smaller subplots. Joe Alwyn has a sweet cameo as an editor to whom Julie is briefly attracted, Richard Ayoade is very funny as a flamboyant tyrant directing a terrible musical – building on his small role in the first film – and few scenes in recent cinema bruise as much as one here involving a ceramic sugar pot and a crestfallen Swinton. Whether Hogg intends to make a Part III or not, she’s crafted a universe you’d happily dive into every couple of years.
