Middle-aged Julie is more sure of herself than her 20-something counterpart but retains an anxious quality that, combined with this mature forthrightness, frequently puts her at odds with the hotel’s receptionist-cum-waitress (Carly-Sophia Davies). The actor – Hogg’s real-life best friend since childhood – deftly takes over the role played by her own daughter, Honor Swinton-Byrne, in The Souvenir Parts One and Two. She cements the eeriness with a soundscape layered with howling winds, shrieking foxes, and creaking doors that put filmmaker Julie increasingly on edge after she checks in the pair of them for her mother’s birthday. Later, a crash zoom on Ros’ springer spaniel and a split-focus close-up of Julie and an empty doorway show Hoggs’ affection for genre hallmarks. Inside, the green glare from fire exit signs creates a sinister glow in quiet corridors and staircases with the portraits of long-dead inhabitants covering walls.
Thick trees and bushes isolate the aged aristocratic home, now a boutique hotel, with stone gargoyles keeping watch from above. The cabbie regales a spooky tale to his outsider passengers, Rosalind and daughter Julie (both played by Tilda Swinton), as he drives them down a dark country lane towards an old stately manor in rural Wales that once belonged to the elderly mother’s relative. A mournful flute sets the atmospheric tone as the lights of a white taxi penetrate a thick, ominous evening fog. The keen supernatural influence is evident from the get-go. Taking inspiration from Gothic cinematic classics such as The Innocents and Night of the Demon, Hogg delivers a nervy, metatextual familial drama navigating the perils of memory and the unknowability of the people who raised us, with a ghostly undercurrent.
Social realism concerning the middle-class has been the benchmark of Joanna Hogg’s filmmaking since she burst onto the scene with Unrelated in 2007 but six films in, the British director has shifted gears a little.
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