Souvenirs
**Seen at the 2022 Renegade Film Festival.**
When the truth about family is hidden, it is destructive when it’s finally revealed. In “Souvenirs,” there are multiple truths that are primed to be nuclear bombs when they are spoken, and then threaten what could be a promising future for Gail, the young woman at the heart of this film.
Gail (Isabella Pisacane) is a young woman who helps her grandmother (Jamie Donnelly) at her small-town store. That sounds quaint until you find out that the store traffics in “murderbilia”- which is to say, authentic artifacts from crime scenes and killers. Gail seems rather ambivalent about the morality in selling such things; she just sees it as a job. With no engagement in keeping up the family business, she has her eyes set on college…if her grandmother allows her. One day, a phone call, and a mysterious package, will have Gail questioning where she came from, and who she really is.
The screenplay by Matthew Sorvillo is smart in the way it gives out exposition when it comes to Gail and her world. It’s interesting that she picks up a stray mouse, and lets it go; we get a glimpse of her gentle nature, and it set things up in the future when it comes to her home life. There are other things that don’t work quite as well- her being bullied sets her up more as a loner, but it doesn’t quite land as strongly as it should- but the performance by Pisacane does; she shows us emotions in the most subtle ways, and her scenes with Donnelly and Abby Awe as her best friend give us a strong sense of who she is, the good and the bad.
The film adds a layer of murder mystery on top of the familial ones, but honestly, that didn’t work quite as well for me as it could have; almost at the outset, I had an idea of where it was headed. Regardless, “Souvenirs” is a thriller that engages us, and has some interesting ideas on family, legacy and who we want to be.
