Joanna Hogg’s film The Souvenir is loved by critics but shunned by the public – why does this gulf exist?

Sight & Sound magazine has voted 'The Souvenir' the greatest movie of the year, but it reveals how far critical taste is now removed from the appetite of the public, says Geoffrey Macnab

'The Souvenir', about a young film student who falls for an older man, stars Honor Swinton Byrne and Tom Burke (A24 Films)

Are they watching the same film? That is the question provoked by the huge difference between the critical and general audience responses towards Joanna Hogg’s latest feature, The Souvenir, which today was revealed as Sight & Sound’s 2019 Best Film of the Year.

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Mike Williams, said that Hogg’s film “was the overwhelming choice of our 100 voting critics". No squabbles there then.

The Souvenir was greeted rapturously by reviewers when it was released in British cinemas in August. “Achingly well-observed”, “an artefact in the highest auteur register”, “mysterious and beautiful” and “an understated gem of a film” are just some of the compliments lobbed in its direction in the UK press. The story of an affair in the London of the early 1980s between a fiercely intelligent but naive, young film student (brilliantly played by Honor Swinton Byrne) and a louche, worldly-wise older man (Tom Burke) with a drug habit, it is a subtle, understated drama that, in the view of this reviewer at least, has a searing emotional power.