While it is a warranted opinion to bemoan the endless output of sequels, an exception can certainly be made for Joanna Hogg’s follow-up The Souvenir Part II––not only one of the best films of the year, but also one of the best sequels of all-time, layering upon what came before while expanding the story in moving, daring ways. Picking up right after the previous film left off, the cast features a mix of familiar faces and new players, including Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade, Charlie Heaton, Harris Dickinson, Joe Alwyn, Ariane Labed, and James Spencer Ashworth. Following its Cannes and NYFF premieres, A24 will release the film in theaters on October 29 and now the first trailer has landed.
Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “At the end of The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg filmed a film in the process of being made. She returns with The Souvenir Part II, a film all about filmmaking and its layered realities and projections. One of the best British directors to emerge this century, Hogg first made her name as a brilliant examiner of the British middle-classes, a fine-comber of their vagaries and mores. One of the most interesting things about her earlier films—Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013)—was the rigor with which she kept her distance: shooting from afar, fragments of conversations, few close-ups. For The Souvenir, a candid work of autofiction, she went the opposite direction and had her biggest success while also making her most conventional work. The Souvenir Part II is anything but: a daring work of meta-filmmaking in which Hogg loops backwards to re-reexamine her own past (in some ways it is more a supplement than a standard sequel).
Watch the trailer below.
The Souvenir Part II opens on October 29.