The Souvenir
A24 | Release Date: May 17, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
92
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
42
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
Watch Now
Stream On
Buy on
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
CineVueLucy PopescuSep 1, 2019
It’s multi-layered and beautifully observed – as much about the creative process as it is about obsessive love. It’s a glorious affirmation of how experience feeds artistic endeavour. Read full review
100
Total FilmJamie GrahamAug 30, 2019
A World Cinema Dramatic prize winner at Sundance, Hogg’s best film yet is an instant British classic. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonMay 22, 2019
The most passionate love affair in The Souvenir is with film. Hogg utilizes an almost cinema verite style, with a visual look of the grainy kind of 16mm film an ’80s film school student would work with. Her style is reminiscent of early Olivier Assayas or Éric Rohmer’s “The Green Ray” (1986), an acknowledged influence. Read full review
100
VoxAlissa WilkinsonMay 21, 2019
The Souvenir clearly stands out as one of the year’s best films: pointedly personal art that somehow manages, in its specificity, to hit on something universal. Read full review
100
ObserverOliver JonesMay 17, 2019
As a result, The Souvenir, Hogg’s fourth film, is an extraordinary rumination on memory and privilege while also being one of the most incisive movies ever to directly address — in moral, philosophical and personal terms — what it means to be a filmmaker. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comMonica CastilloMay 17, 2019
For me, The Souvenir is perhaps the most empathetic movie to capture that kind of bad romance, the way it seeps into every aspect of your life, the way it changes your behavior, how you hold onto the memories of good times when things get rough and how after it ends, you're a changed person. Read full review
100
The AtlanticDavid SimsMay 16, 2019
Hogg is not a sensationalistic filmmaker, but rather someone who can convey tremendous amounts of emotion through total tranquility on-screen. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMay 16, 2019
The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 13, 2019
In tackling a story that is presumably, and perhaps painfully, close to home, [Hogg] has made her farthest-reaching film yet. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfFeb 19, 2019
While it’s unspooling, The Souvenir feels like the only film in the world—the only one that matters. Read full review
100
TheWrapTomris LaffyFeb 3, 2019
The result is the best kind of fine art: heartbreaking, sophisticated and deeply cinematic all at once. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 2, 2019
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. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyFeb 2, 2019
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. Read full review
100
IndieWireDavid EhrlichFeb 2, 2019
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. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangFeb 2, 2019
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. Read full review
100
The PlaylistCarlos AguilarFeb 2, 2019
Survived pain arises as both a vehicle for growth and catalyst for the revaluation of one’s impetus in Joanna Hogg’s introspectively awe-inspiring stroke of virtuosity The Souvenir. Read full review
100
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganFeb 2, 2019
This portrait of the artist as a young film-maker will certainly stand the test of time. Read full review
100
VarietyGuy LodgeFeb 2, 2019
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. Read full review
91
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerMay 16, 2019
The Souvenir‘s power is deceptive, in a way; it’s only at the film’s end, at the moment of its bracing final image, that its ideas and genre subversions come fully into focus. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattMay 15, 2019
The story casts a spell, and Swinton Byrne is a milky, beguiling presence; it’s almost as if you’re watching her become a person in real time. Read full review
91
The Film StageJordan RaupFeb 2, 2019
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. Read full review
90
Rolling StonePeter TraversMay 17, 2019
Written and directed by the bracingly brilliant Joanna Hogg, this delicate, dazzling memoir traces her own origin story, and there is something superheroic about her struggle to look back without hitting the brick wall of formula and weepy nostalgia. Read full review
90
SlateDana StevensMay 16, 2019
Ambiguous, finely shaded autobiographical dramas like this one don’t generally form the cornerstone of an expanded universe. But Honor Swinton Byrne, making her feature film debut, has created a character who’s complex (and at times maddening) enough to deserve further exploration. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 16, 2019
Hogg has made a gorgeous, haunting movie drawn from a very real place and time. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinMay 15, 2019
At her best — which is more often than you can imagine — Hogg convinces you that incoherence is the only honest way to tell a story with any emotional complexity. She spoils you for the overshapers, the spoon-feeders. Read full review
90
Paste MagazineAndrew CrumpMay 15, 2019
A hushed, unassuming, intimate movie to remind audiences of the power of cinema by interrogating the definition of cinema itself. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerMay 29, 2019
That Swinton Byrne's performance is so open, so immediate, so caught up in emotional truths rather than performative beats, makes this one of the year's most unique and memorable roles. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJun 13, 2019
Watching The Souvenir is like watching a friend drown, and being unable to help. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzJun 5, 2019
The director’s semi-autobiographical, 1980s-set story may be small – it mostly focuses on the turbulent relationship between Julie and Anthony as the former struggles to find her artistic voice and the latter battles various addictions – but her impulses and vision are grand. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperMay 23, 2019
Virtually every frame of this film is strikingly effective. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineCarson LundMay 22, 2019
Its stylistic fluctuations are a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrMay 22, 2019
The Souvenir demands to be seen. Hogg is a major filmmaker pointing herself in new directions -- the past and future simultaneously – and hashing out the places where memory tells the truth and where it only offers more romanticism, more lies. Read full review
88
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanMay 20, 2019
But make no mistake: Hogg’s quirky coming-of-age tale (which teases a forthcoming sequel) is no misty remembrance of bygone days. Rather, it is a clear-eyed reflection on how hindsight — and true art — is always 20/20. Read full review
83
Original-CinThom ErnstJun 13, 2019
This is a filmmaker in full control of her craft. But as accomplished as The Souvenir is, the story it chooses to tell can leave audiences both mesmerized and alienated. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd May 13, 2019
There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeSep 1, 2019
It’s powerful stuff: wryly tender, frequently funny, but insidiously suffocating. More than once I found myself stifling a scream – and I mean that as a compliment. Read full review
80
EmpireTerri WhiteAug 28, 2019
Joanna Hogg paints a precise picture of a woman trying to develop her own artistic vision while caught in the slipstream of a toxic relationship. An understated, exquisite gem of a film. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneMay 20, 2019
This is Hogg’s most disconcerting work to date. Like her previous movies, such as “Unrelated” (2007), it proceeds in lengthy takes, and the camera, more often than not, prefers to keep its distance, the better to observe her characters — the human animals — at play. Read full review
80
CineVueRory O’ConnorFeb 15, 2019
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. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenMay 30, 2019
The Souvenir reveals itself slowly, calmly, with great deliberation. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckMay 21, 2019
Sincerity is what anchors this film — especially Swinton Byrne’s astonishingly sincere performance. Read full review
75
New York PostSara StewartMay 15, 2019
Hogg (“Exhibition”) sets The Souvenir in the 1980s but shoots her subjects with the long-armed reserve of a period piece; the ivory-complexioned Byrne bears a resemblance to 18th- and 19th-century European portraits glimpsed throughout. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicGarrett MitchellMay 23, 2019
As much as Swinton Byrne and Burke add lived-in qualities to their characters, there's really not much to like about the leads or their toxic relationship that unravels at a mind-numbing pace. Read full review
50
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJan 22, 2020
In the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience. Read full review
45
Film ThreatAnthony Ray BenchMay 13, 2019
To me, the film is boring, lifeless, too dreary for its own good, and has really annoying quirks and habits that just irritate me. Read full review
More From This Movie

92 Critic Reviews

6.2 User Reviews

Details & Credits|Trailers

Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
1 86 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
2 84 Are You There God? It's Me,...
3 78 John Wick: Chapter 4
4 75 Polite Society
5 73 Air
SEE ALL
Essential Links
New on Amazon Prime Video
New on Netflix
Coming Soon to DVD/Blu-ray
SEE ALL