It’s kind of upsetting from my own perspective that A24 does not deliver memorable movies this year. I mean the only two I can think off the top of my head are “Gloria Bell” and sort of “Climax”. Those films at least had stories to tell and feel fresh.

With last year, you could name many modern classics like “Lean on Pete”, “Eighth Grade”, “First Reformed, “Mid90s”, and “Hereditary”.

Unfortunately, this year has been kind of a slog for A24 so far. I honestly thought Clarie Denis’ sci-fi film “High Life” was decent, but could have been a lot more stronger with its pacing despite having great performances by Robert Pattinson and Mia Goth.

Last Saturday, I literally had “SpongeBob” energy to have the pleasure to go see Joanna Hogg’s coming-of-age film “The Souvenir”. I was just hoping for A24 to recover from “High Life” because coming-of-age is one of the best genres film has to offer today.

A24’s critics and audience with recent films don’t have the best friendship together.

I can see why with “The Souvenir”.

The film centers around a film school student named Julie (played by Honor Swinton Byrne) whom is interested in directing independent films. She has a kind mother, too played by Tilda Swinton.

At a very quiet sounding dinner at Britain, Julie gets involved with a questionable human being named Anthony (Tom Burke) where at Julie’s house, they both listen to the most authentic sounding opera at the same time displaying random conversations.

Julie seems to feel uncomfortable with Anthony with certain traits he showcases to her. The thing is that does she want to keep him as her “souvenir”? Get it? Ha, ha, ha, ha.

“The Souvenir” unfortunately fails as a coming-of-age movie that I was expecting it to be one of the better films of 2019. It is really both the excruciating pacing and depressing tone that truly does the damage to the film’s premise because sort of like “High Life”, there could have been something strong with this movie.

For her debut performance, Honor Swinton Byrne does a good enough job in certain amounts of the film. She portrays an honest and strong woman that is aware of her personal surroundings especially during one scene during the end.

The three sunset trees evoke a very unique metaphor to Julie’s stories.

Tilda Swinton is decent as Julie’s mother despite being in the film for only 15-20 minutes.

Other than the positives, I have never seen an A24 movie that has been so ridiculous with its pacing since Andrea Arnold’s 2016 pretentious road trip movie “American Honey”. It might be even worse.

Truth be told, there are many A24 movies LIKE “A Ghost Story” and “American Honey” that I might bring on controversy over.

What “The Souvenir” reminded me of (believe it or not) is one of these sleep worthy Masterpiece episodes from BBC you would encounter around midnight on PBS.

I felt very bad for nearly everyone involved in this movie especially for Tilda Swinton since she has been such a fantastic actress in the past. The movie feels very unworthy and pretentious for a coming-of-age movie.

The scenes collided in the movie don’t have any sense of taste or reason to be involved. I mean there might be little music bits of The Pretenders’ “2000 Miles” and Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” that might bring just a cheese string of excitement.

Tom Burke as Anthony makes you think that he is this soon-to “untrustworthy” heroin addict that you want to love to hate him. He comes off as a surprisingly bland love interest to Julie that it brings even more boredom. Yay!

There have been many amazing coming-of-age movies in the 2010’s that involve two star-crossed lovers like “The Spectacular Now” and “The Fault in Our Stars” that have so much more care and attention to detail than Hogg’s “The Souvenir”.

I literally never wanted a film to be over since I saw “Little”. This is for sure a keeper for the most disappointing film of 2019 for sure. It could have been something special, but nope! It had to be clattered with conversations that came off as filler.

I would of course like to experience Joanna Hogg’s earlier works, but I would not appreciate being depressed through such a horrendous exercise like “The Souvenir”.

Wait, there is going to be a sequel?? God bless the film industry. Robert Pattinson, all I have to say is good luck.

Grade: 2/10