When I first watched The Souvenir, I thought I was watching a story. Very quickly, it shifted from a viewing experience into a space of mirroring and recognition. This text begins as a film analysis and gradually becomes a personal reckoning: an essay that tries to hold a formal reading of cinema and a subjective act of closure within the same body of writing. Dial M for Movie was born out of a simple but persistent belief: that cinema often understands life more truthfully than language does. Not by explaining it, not by resolving it, but by staying with its contradictions. In my own personal journey, I have repeatedly turned to films as a way of thinking, feeling, and remembering, searching for images and narratives that could mirror what I was living through when words fell short. We don’t watch films to escape life; we watch them to recognize it. And again and again, I’ve found that this practice works, sometimes with an almost unsettling accuracy.
The Souvenir was one of those films. It did not romanticize what it portrayed, nor did it attempt to soften or elevate it. It didn’t raise its voice or rely on dramatic gestures. Instead, through silence, absence, and repetition, it pressed gently but insistently against something already present. The film became less a story to follow than a space to inhabit, one that allowed difficult recognitions to surface without turning them into spectacle. This essay considers The Souvenir Part I and Part II together, not only as a comprehensive analysis of the films, but also as a personal attempt to close a circuit.
Directed by Joanna Hogg, The Souvenir Part I (2019) and Part II (2021) are built upon a semi-autobiographical narrative. Drawing from her own years at film school, Hogg focuses on the emotional and psychological fractures of a young woman studying cinema. The protagonist, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne)—much like Hogg herself—is a student whose artistic and emotional identities are still in the process of forming. Part I follows Julie’s relationship with an older, charismatic, yet deeply troubled man Anthony (Tom Burke), and allows us to witness the slow construction of a trauma bond. The film records the relationship itself—dependency, imbalance, manipulation—with a restrained, almost clinical distance. Nothing is overstated. The camera observes rather than intervenes.
The Souvenir Part II, however, shifts its gaze entirely. This time, the focus is not the event, but what remains after it. Julie’s lover has died, and the film’s true weight emerges here. Those who have lived through similar experiences know this well: the most difficult part is never the moment itself, but the long aftermath. The quiet, corrosive process of guilt, shame, survival, meaning-making, and living on. For this reason, I personally find Part II more powerful and more unsettling. It refuses the dramatic representation of grief and instead dwells in its formless, ongoing, everyday nature, the way mourning infiltrates time without ever announcing itself. The mother figure occupies a central place in Joanna Hogg’s cinema. In The Souvenir, Julie’s mother is played by Tilda Swinton, while Julie herself is portrayed by Honor Swinton Byrne, Swinton’s real-life daughter. This casting choice adds more than performance; it introduces a tangible sense of intergenerational memory into the mother–daughter relationship onscreen. Hogg’s collaboration with Tilda Swinton continues in The Eternal Daughter, where many of the themes discussed here reappear in a different, more distilled form.
Stories We Hold Onto: Beliefs Are the Hardest to Break
Joanna Hogg’s cinema is set in the past, but it is never nostalgic. In The Souvenir, the 1980s function not as a period backdrop but as a stage for the timelessness of trauma. Memory here is blurred, fragmented, and incomplete, much like the traces left behind by traumatic relationships in the mind. Both Julie and, strikingly, her mother are still shown sleeping with stuffed animals, a quiet but telling detail that points to a self-suspended between adulthood and childhood. The father’s near-absence, combined with the mother’s controlling presence and emotional unavailability—at times bordering on absence itself—shapes Julie’s inner landscape. Her emotional voids are carefully established, and throughout the film, they appear to be filled in only one place: Anthony.
Anthony is older, worldly, intellectually seductive, mysterious, and always slightly out of reach. The incompatibility between them is visible from the start: their body language, their rhythms, even their ways of speaking fail to meet. They never quite align. And yet, it is precisely this misalignment that forms the core of the relationship. The spaces Anthony introduces Julie to—elegant restaurants, hotels, trips, checks, gifts—do not simply offer pleasure; they promise a lifestyle. Julie is drawn not only to Anthony as a person, but to the glittering yet unstable world he represents. Her attachment to objects, symbols, and places becomes a way of compensating for the absence of emotional grounding. These are not signs of desire, but of defense: strategies developed by a mind that has nowhere else to hold on.
In such dynamics, what we fall in love with is often not the man himself, but the atmosphere he creates, the symbols he offers, the sense of being “special,” the feeling of stepping out of one’s own life entirely. This was not love; it was a mode of survival. These relationships consume the mind so completely that they leave no room for anything else. Julie stops attending school, withdraws from her friends, turns inward. This total absorption serves both sides: it is exactly what the manipulative figure seeks—undivided attention—but it is also what the manipulated person clings to. When the external world feels overwhelming, stagnant, or impossible to navigate, fighting everything at once feels unbearable. Focusing all attention on a single struggle, a single person, can feel safer. The spotlight narrows. The world shrinks. And within that narrowing, survival masquerades as intimacy.
Femininity, Womanhood, and Suppression
Julie’s femininity is not suppressed because of the relationship. It has been suppressed long before Anthony enters the picture. Her short hair, her masculine clothing, the distance she keeps from her own body… These are not reactions to him, but layers she has already learned to wear. Julie is, in essence, deeply feminine. But that femininity has been carefully wrapped, masked, and muted before it ever reaches the outside world. For someone like Julie, femininity equals visibility and visibility feels dangerous. To be seen is to risk exposure, so she learns to make herself smaller, quieter, harder to read. Her hair, her clothes, her physical presence function as practiced forms of self-protection. Not an absence of womanhood, but a way of containing it.
And yet, suppression is never total. There is a tension at the core of Julie’s inner life: even as she conceals herself to feel safe, a part of her still longs to be seen. Even if only partially. Even if only through a softened, neutralized version of herself, the version that feels less risky. She wants recognition. She wants confirmation. She wants to matter. Anthony, importantly, does not arrive looking for a woman like Julie. She is not the kind of woman he is supposed to desire. And perhaps that is precisely why his attention feels so disorienting. For someone who has grown accustomed to hiding, to being overlooked, to managing her own visibility so carefully, being noticed at all can feel intoxicating. Not because it affirms desire, but because it interrupts erasure.
Caught between the impulse to disappear and the human need to be seen, Julie is particularly vulnerable to someone who appears fascinating, attentive, and interested. She is not seeking seduction; she is responding to recognition. And having learned for so long to keep herself contained, she is unprepared for what happens when attention finally arrives and mistakes it for safety. Anthony looks at her as if he sees her. And that “as if” is enough. It is precisely this illusion of being seen that Julie clings to so desperately. Not because it is real, but because it feels like proof of existence. In trauma bonds, being desired is not about pleasure, it is about survival. It becomes the only place where the self feels momentarily solid. This dynamic begins to shift in Part II. The second film is not only about Anthony’s absence, but about Julie’s gradual return to herself, to her body, her agency, her femininity. This return is slow, quiet, and untheatrical. There are no dramatic transformations. But it is real. Femininity re-emerges not as performance or seduction, but as ownership. Not something to offer or hide, but something to inhabit.
Reclaiming the Narrative: Part II, Control, and the Refusal of Memory
What Julie does in Part II is not simply to make a film. It is an attempt to reclaim what has already been lived by restaging it. She reconstructs the same scenes, rebuilds the same spaces, and re-enacts the same moments in front of the camera. But this time, she is no longer passive. She is no longer the one disappearing inside those scenes; she is the one framing them. The final act—tearing down the carefully constructed set, ripping it apart, dismantling it piece by piece—feels like one of the most liberating moments in the film. But not because it honors memory. Quite the opposite. It is a refusal to continue performing inside a stage that was never hers to begin with. Those sets were already designed long before Julie entered them. The scenes, the roles, the rules… All of it had been arranged by someone else. What Julie does in this moment is not to preserve the past, but to overthrow it. To tear down the architecture of a relationship she was invited to inhabit, but never allowed to shape. By destroying the set, she rejects the script she had been quietly expected to follow.
This gesture is not about remembering. It is about withdrawal. About refusing to remain a character inside someone else’s narrative. The destruction of the set marks the moment Julie stops participating in a fiction that demanded her disappearance in exchange for belonging. It is not a tribute to what was. It is the courage to step out of a role that was never chosen freely. After Anthony’s death, the people Julie encounters—family members, friends, other women who claim to have known him—gradually expose the same unsettling truth: this relationship was never what Julie experienced it as. While Anthony knew a great deal about Julie, Julie knew almost nothing about Anthony’s life. His past, his habits, his other relationships, his debts, his lies, everything remains fragmented or concealed. Anthony’s life is not a life Julie truly inhabits. She is not at its center; she is barely present at all.
This is why Julie’s posthumous attempt to gather Anthony from others—to collect information, stories, fragments—feels deeply pathetic. And yet, painfully familiar. Because this effort is not really about knowing the person who was loved; it is about retroactively constructing a relationship that never fully existed. Julie feels as though she knew Anthony better than anyone, but slowly it becomes clear that no one truly knew him. Anthony is not someone capable of genuine contact. One of the film’s most uncomfortable and most honest qualities is its refusal to romanticize the violence embedded in this relationship. Physical violence is never explicitly shown, but psychological violence is present in almost every scene. The jealousy, the belittling, the humiliation, the emotional ambiguity, the constant lying. What Anthony inflicts on Julie is not overt aggression, but a slow erosion of the self. And the most dangerous aspect of this kind of violence is precisely that it is so often mistaken for love. The Souvenir quietly dismantles this illusion.
Control, Boundaries, and the Desire to Escape
Julie’s family dynamics are especially pronounced in the first film. Her mother’s presence is deeply controlling, while the father remains a faint, almost erased figure in the background. One scene is particularly striking: Julie’s mother takes Julie’s hands and examines them closely, lingering on them in silence. This moment is not an expression of maternal care; it is a powerful image of control: over the body, the child, even life itself. Julie’s decision to hide the relationship from her mother can be read both as an attempt at adulthood and as an inability to escape the protective bubble her mother has built around her.
This is why the film-within-the-film structure is so meaningful. Julie cannot narrate what she lived through directly, but she can restage it. Cinema becomes less a means of expression than a field of control. In scenes where she had no agency while living them, she attempts to regain authorship behind the camera. That is why the destruction of the set at the end reads less like mourning and more like an act of liberation. Formally, the film’s slowness is inseparable from what it is trying to tell. The Souvenir refuses speed. Long silences, empty spaces, interrupted conversations… Each frame asks to be lingered on. This aesthetic distance intensifies the emotional weight of the story. There is beauty here, but no consolation.
Julie’s troubled relationship with boundaries runs throughout both films. From the boundary violations she experiences with her roommates to the unsettling, intimacy-without-love scene with Jim (Charlie Heaton) in Part II, Julie consistently struggles to establish limits. And this is precisely what makes her appealing to someone like Anthony. Someone who cannot set boundaries is ideal for someone who recognizes none. At its core, Julie’s relationship with Anthony functions as a promise of rescue. A possible escape from the glass enclosure of her life. A chance for something meaningful to finally begin. What she falls in love with, perhaps most deeply, is not the man, but the possibility that her life might, at last, become something that matters.
Asymmetrical Knowledge: Who Knows Whom?
One of the film’s most crucial dynamics is the imbalance of knowledge within the relationship. Anthony knows a great deal about Julie. Julie knows almost nothing about Anthony. This asymmetry is not accidental; it is knowledge used as power. By remaining opaque, Anthony secures dominance within the relationship. Julie’s later attempts to gather information about him to piece together his life after his death is the tragic consequence of this imbalance. That Joanna Hogg made this film years after the events it draws from, is meaningful in itself. Some stories cannot be told while they are being lived; they require time, distance, and survival. This temporal gap becomes part of the film’s ethical structure. Anthony’s lack of conventional physical attractiveness is also a significant detail. The Souvenir does not ignore this, it quietly insists on it. Because the film makes something very clear: attraction here does not emerge from the body, but from promise. Anthony’s appeal is not physical; it is narrative. His face is unremarkable, even awkward. Yet over time, Julie finds him deeply attractive, not because of what he is, but because of what he represents. In relationships like this, desire detaches from the body and attaches itself to possibility. You stop seeing the person in front of you and begin seeing the future they seem to offer. That possibility slowly overtakes reality.
This is how roles are assigned. The other person ceases to exist as they are and begins to function as the figure you need them to be. In Julie’s mind, Anthony grows larger through his mystery, his inaccessibility, and the life he appears to embody. As this imagined figure expands, the real person recedes. Eventually, even physical perception bends to the narrative: the feeling of attraction no longer originates in the body, but in the power of the story itself. The Souvenir exposes this illusion quietly, but unmistakably. One of the most painful moments in Part II is the scene in which Julie speaks to another woman after Anthony’s death. Julie introduces herself as “his girlfriend.” The woman says almost nothing. But the silence in that scene communicates more than any explanation could. It becomes almost visible that there was something between them, that a closeness existed in the past. The film offers no clarification; instead, it leaves intuition in the hands of the viewer.
Later, when Julie imagines Anthony dancing with that same woman intimately, almost privately while filming her own work in Part II, it feels like a confirmation of that intuition. The film does not accuse; it allows recognition to surface. At this point, the film exposes something deeply unsettling: betrayal is not simply a matter of someone being with another person. The most devastating realization is discovering that while someone treated you as if you were the most important person in their life, you were not truly part of their life at all. Anthony lives fragmented existences across different contexts, with different people, presenting a different version of himself each time. He is never fully present with anyone. What Julie experiences is not a single act of infidelity, but a systematic erasure. This is why Julie’s pain is not only grief, but retrospective recognition. It is the slow settling of the thought: I was not in his life. And perhaps the most injurious part is realizing that this was not unique to her. That the same pattern existed with others does not diminish what she lived through, it intensifies it.
The Danger of Asking Questions
As the relationship progresses, a disturbing inverse pattern emerges: the worse Anthony’s behavior becomes, the more attached Julie grows. She stays longer. She speaks less. The film never dramatizes this through confrontation or explosion; instead, it shows it through silence and concealment. Anthony crosses a line; Julie does not name it. He goes further, Julie searches for explanations. He does worse still; Julie tries to help him. This cycle is one of the most recognizable mechanisms of traumatic relationships: as violence increases, the bond does not loosen, it hardens.
Julie’s response is not resistance. It is collapse. She becomes terrorized, smaller, quieter. She does not tell others what is happening; she does not even fully tell herself. Because somewhere inside, she knows that what she is living is not “normal.” And what is not normal is difficult to put into words. The inability to articulate experience deepens isolation. This is exactly what Julie undergoes: she withdraws from life, stops attending school, gradually erases her friendships, until her world is reduced to a single person. This isolation is not only emotional, but also material. Julie asks her mother for money, lies about it, and uses it for Anthony. Her own life, needs, and future are suspended. The relationship occupies so much space that nothing else is allowed to exist alongside it: not school, not art, not friendship, not alternative possibilities. This is one of the most insidious aspects of trauma bonds, they are not merely harmful; they replace everything.
Eventually, no one else can make you feel the way that person does. Not because of who they are, but because of the intensity generated within the relationship. Unable to find that intensity elsewhere, the external world begins to feel dull and meaningless. You stop wanting to see anyone. You stop wanting to speak. Loneliness deepens, yet the relationship continues to appear as the only possible exit. And yes, no matter how much harm occurs, more is forgiven. More is endured. More is stayed. In Part II, the moment in which scenes are restaged exposes this dynamic in its most unguarded form. One of the actors pauses and says:
“I don’t understand this scene. Why doesn’t she ask anything? What do you mean she didn’t even confront him?” Julie’s answer lands at the very core of the film: “Yes… I really didn’t ask.”
This sentence describes not only a relationship, but a psychological state. In trauma bonds, asking questions is dangerous. To ask is to risk hearing the truth. And hearing the truth often means the end of the relationship. Julie’s silence is not passivity; it is a survival strategy. But the cost of that strategy is devastating.
The Architecture of Dependency
One of the most deceptive aspects of such relationships is that violence is not visible at the beginning. Anthony does not reveal his cruelty outright. The initial bond is built through attention, care, and the feeling of being chosen. Harmful behaviors do not appear all at once; they emerge gradually, step by step, as Julie becomes more attached. Small boundary violations. Small lies. Small erasures. Over time, Anthony absorbs everything in Julie’s life into the bond. Her education, her friendships, her family, her time, her energy, all are slowly pulled inside the relationship. Eventually, Julie loses not only Anthony, but the possibility of a life without him. This isolation is not accidental; it is the most fertile ground for dependency. The more alone someone becomes, the more the other person turns into their entire world.
And perhaps the most destructive aspect of these relationships reveals itself here: after rendering someone dependent in every sense, knowing full well that you are their whole world, to leave without care. Without explanation. Without farewell. Without even a note. This is what Anthony does. He leaves Julie in the center of an emptied space, her entire world withdrawn at once. This is heavier than physical abandonment. Because what remains is not only loss, but absence. Being left in emptiness is terrifying. But it also brings an unavoidable confrontation. Anthony’s indifference forces Julie to face herself for the first time. The film does not dramatize this reckoning; instead, it allows silence to say what words cannot: sometimes it is only when everything is taken away that one realizes what they were standing on or that they were never standing at all.
