Tandem review of The Souvenir - a semi-biographical drama directed by Joanna Hogg and starring Honor Swinton Byrne - and its sequel The Souvenir Part II.

The Scary of Sixty-First, the feature directorial debut of Belarusian-American actress, filmmaker, and podcast host, Dasha Nekrasova, presents itself as two movies. It’s at once an earnest, self-important, mumblecore horror film about passive twenty-somethings being angry at the injustices of the world, or it’s a tongue-in-cheek parody of said pretentious low-budget horror films.

Almodóvar effortlessly manages to create a complex narrative with two central characters that is still easy to follow, but does not offer to hold the audience’s hand, encouraging watchers to put the pieces together themselves, and possibly come to their own conclusions long before even the characters do.

The story is of a group of scientists (lead by characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio & Jennifer Lawrence) who discover a large “planet-killer” comet is going to strike the earth in half a year, and the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to get the people in charge of the United States, and the world, to do something about it.

This is a bittersweet story of the powerful role that film plays in people’s lives beyond storytelling alone.