Unrelated is Joanna Hogg’s first film, is one of the key British texts of the 21st century and one of the strongest ‘first films’ ever. It marked the arrival of a major voice, and the most important British director working today. This is the first of a planned series of blog posts, each dedicated to one the Hogg’s great films.
Joanna Hogg is, unequivocally, the most important British filmmaker of the 21st century. There is nobody making work that can rival her fierce intelligence and restrained skill in this artistically barren shithole we call a film industry - and it isn’t even close. That she remains chronically underappreciated by the institutions which are supposed to champion her is a gross injustice but one which is hardly surprising. Because what lends Hogg’s work its potent distinction is that which renders her a neglected bastard of the establishment: here is a white woman from astonishing wealth making films about white women from astonishing wealth. She ticks very few boxes, and revisits with a semi-obsessive intensity a recurrent set of themes and motifs. Her films are admirable in their contentedness to not adapt to the phony standards of le règle de jeu. She does this unapologetically and without remorse. Hogg strikes out in her own directions, unpredictable but always cohesive. Fascinatingly, as film follows film, the entire oeuvre feels like it’s taking on a solid shape of its own, a sort of cinematic dramaturgy. Each film reinterrogates the ideas of the previous ones: class and wealth, age dynamics, our emotional and physical ties to buildings, and a feminist interest in woman-as-artist (and vice-versa).
Even if it pales in comparison to her subsequent, more assured works, Hogg’s debut feature Unrelatedmust’ve felt like a miracle when it premiered at the London Film Festival in 2007. Here was a film which took a distinctly British premise (a group of upper-class Londoners vacationing in a divine Tuscan castle) and combined it with an ingenious aesthetic: blend together the composed steadiness of Ozu Yasujirô and the sexual and social ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni and you’re getting a vague approximation of the vibe Hogg gets with Unrelated.
The film follows Anna (Kathryn Worth), who arrives at the Tuscan holiday home of her old school friend without her husband, Alex. Her pathetic excuse for his absence hides a blatant fissure, a pulling-apart she knows is inevitable. The aforementioned school-friend, Verena (Mary Roscoe) is faintly puzzled, if understanding. The holiday is split down the middle between the ‘old’ and their teenaged children. But Alex’s absence forces Anna into a kind of in-between state, barred from truly inhabiting either camp, and she finds herself increasingly drawn to the teenagers and their de facto leader, the charismatic Oakley (Tom Hiddleston, in his first major role). It was shot with a virtually non-existent budget, and most of the costumes were sourced directly from the cast, who also lived in the castle the characters are holidaying in, which only lends to the supposed naturalism of the film.
To say Unrelated is without plot would be unfair: the film has a narrative, it just strolls along towards its conclusion at the same pace as tourists on their nightly promenade. Hogg’s style is elliptical, unhurried. Even if the film’s budgetary limitations clearly impede Hogg’s vision, it’s evident even here her intentions are largely pictorial, and her images deftly reflect the class dynamics she affectionately skewers. As Richard Brody said of Antonioni upon the latter’s 100th birthday: “his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him.” The same could be said of Hogg, who replaces Antonioni’s austere black and white photography for sun-dappled digital, shot on affordable handheld and faintly reminiscent of a family holiday video. The pacing of Unrelated is languid, content with slowness. An audacious move for a debut feature.
That said, it would be ludicrous to pretend that this isn’t Hogg’s first feature, and the camerawork often feels dictated more by pragmatism than by artistic intent: the architectural influence of Archipelago (2010) Exhibition(2013) is largely absent, as is the grainy, handheld autofiction of The Souvenir (2019-2021) and The Eternal Daughter (2022). Unrelated, then, is best understood in a kind of musical context: here is the first EP, less assured but no less essential for it, a major artist taking their first tentative steps towards greatness.
To be frank, all of these qualities eluded me when I first watched the film in October 2023. I’d booked tickets to see a preview of The Eternal Daughter at the BFI, with an introduction and post-film Q&A from Hogg and Tilda Swinton. I’d actually already seen the film but wanted to see it on the big screen, and having seen both parts of The Souvenir, I thought it prudent to work through the rest of Hogg’s filmography. Going back to the beginning was an interesting exercise, the roughness of Unrelated merely accentuating the sheer assuredness of the subsequent films and lending the film itself a kind of endearing throwback charm. Regardless, it struck me as a strange film: overlong, its characters glimpsed too briefly to impress psychologically, something exacerbated by the disgraceful quality of the file streaming via Amazon Prime.
But on a recent rewatch, it was these very qualities which lend the film a strange, distressing power that had entirely eluded me upon my first viewing. Hogg’s game is a clever one; she deliberately employs the withholding techniques we’d typically associate with the Transcendental Style to craft a work of slowly devastating potency, a horror film of sorts, about a lonely woman realising that her life will never resemble what she thought it would. Anna is, in a way, the titular character: unrelated to the rest of the characters, and subsequently adrift from them, doomed to be a perpetual outsider. This is reflected in the cinematography, which often groups members of the family within a single frame whilst isolating Anna. It’s also evident in the editing, which exclusively limits our range of story information to Anna’s perspective; we never see what the other characters speak of when Anna isn’t there, but the film also distances us from Anna herself by employing a number of one-sided phone calls between Anna and Alex. We’re unrelated too, in a sense, held at a distance, voyeurs peering in through glass. Hogg’s camera never dares to lower itself to the level of Ozu’s tatami shots, because to do so would place us on equal-footing with the characters and would thus invite us to emphasise with them and – gasp! – care for them. The closest Hogg gets to a tatami shot is what I’ve affectionately termed the après shot: a cluster of characters, showered and refreshed after a daily excursion, sipping cocktails in the castle’s lush garden, shot at a distance, so as to not tempt us to pull up a chair and engage in the conversation.
The genius of Worth’s performance as Anna, and Hogg’s story and direction, is to resign all of these feelings of personal and sexual alienation to simmer away beneath the surface, where they boil away with increasing aggression. Anna’s sexual attraction towards Oakley is nothing to do with sex at all, but rather a woman yearning to defy the biologically inevitable, to make a last stand against menopause and the childlessness she sees as a hidden wound, a source of shame. The long-withheld moment of catharsis, of release, takes place in a bland roadside hotel, the distance from the castle finally granting Anna the objective view of events we’ve had from the very beginning. Anna reveals to Verena that a recent pregnancy turned out to be false, and that she has begun menopause and will never have children. Verna cradles Anna, a startling gesture of physical intimacy that softly gestures towards their friendship as schoolchildren. When I first watched the film, I found Worth’s sobbing and wailing melodramatic, verging on schlock, jarring in the context of the coolness which permeates the rest of the film. Truthfully, I’m still undecided on this sequence, and even as I write these words, I find myself simultaneously baffled by and endeared with Hogg’s decision to so radically upend film’s tone and style so near to its ending.
But if anything, this sequence serves as a fitting reminder of the cinematic context Unrelated was made in. The film ushered in a new era of British filmmaking by tearing up the dreary rulebook written by whiny socio-realists like Ken Loach and pushed towards something more pictorial and sophisticated, as Antonioni did with Italian Neorealism in 1960. But we need to remember that even he struggled to fully shake off Neorealism’s influence, and Hogg resorts to a typically British realist ending in Unrelated, too. People yell, their feelings can be contained no longer, their secrets unable to be kept, the truth reconciles all, credits roll. And if this kind of ending is strictly a one-off for Hogg, it only lends Unrelated a beginner’s charm.
Unrelated is an essential entry into the canon of ‘first’ films, and an essential text for understanding the direction British cinema began to head in towards the end of the first decade of our infant century. Here was a filmmaker who’d been quietly honing her skills making shorts and working in television, who announced her arrival into the industry not with a bang, but with a remarkably assured yet seductively nonchalant sigh. She didn’t care for a dull, British tradition of filmmaking. A rabid cinéaste, Hogg’s influences were far more interesting and sophisticated than those of anyone who had come before her. Hogg continues to make it look oh-so-easy, but what lends Unrelated its power - even now - is undoubtedly that it heralded the arrival of a new auteur, a singular voice that was unquestioningly, unmistakably itself.
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