A Dramedy About What We Keep

Read Time:5 Minute, 49 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Souvenir
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Genre: Dramedy
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 26m
Director: David Ketterer Spencer
Writer: David Ketterer Spencer
Cast: Ruby Cruz, Eric Berryman, Janeane Garofalo, Mozhan Navabi, Laith Nakli, Willie C. Carpenter
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Dances with Films Los Angeles

RAVING REVIEW: The real subject here is what people carry around long after the day itself is over. David Ketterer Spencer’s New York dramedy sends estranged friends Kevin and Dani across the city after they come into possession of a dead self-help guru’s wallet, a premise with enough complications to support a lighter buddy comedy on its own. The film has argumentative heirs, questionable poetry, a strange watch, and the promise of a reward. Though its staying power comes from the way a simple act of returning something to its rightful place keeps drawing the two people who are returning it toward each other.

Kevin and Dani don’t reconnect in the way former friends often do. Their reunion feels more awkward than magical, built out of old shared shorthand, guarded looks, and the strange imbalance of knowing someone while no longer knowing what their life looks like. Kevin's panic about his academic future gives Eric Berryman a character who can seem thoughtful and anxious in the same breath. Dani, played by Ruby Cruz, has returned from time away with things she’s clearly not saying, and Cruz gives that evasiveness a lived-in quality rather than turning it into a puzzle box for the audience to solve.

What makes SOUVENIR work so well is watching those two different vibes bump against each other. Kevin approaches the day as if enough reasoning will make everything line up. Dani moves with more instinct, more deflection, and a stronger tolerance for chaos. Neither is treated as correct. Spencer lets them frustrate each other in ways that feel specific to people who once mattered so deeply to one another but have since lost the trust of being honest. The film is smart enough to understand that estrangement doesn’t always stem from a single betrayal. Sometimes it comes from missed calls, unfinished conversations, small moments, and the slow embarrassment of not knowing how to restart.

Spencer’s background as a first assistant director shows in the film’s control over movement. This is a dialogue-heavy New York story, yet it doesn’t feel trapped in a string of static conversations. The city gives the characters drive, and the structure lets each stop nudge them toward something they might not have admitted if they’d sat down across from each other and tried to have “the talk.” SOUVENIR benefits from that spirit because friendship is rarely examined in one perfect confession. More often, it slips out sideways while you’re waiting for a train, arguing about directions, meeting someone unpleasant, or realizing the other person remembers a moment differently than you do.

SOUVENIR isn’t only about a day in New York, but about the way a day becomes a story after the fact. Memory has a way of turning people into heroes, villains, missed chances, or symbols of whatever we need the past to mean. Kevin’s recollection hangs over the film with a quiet uncertainty, asking whether we’re seeing events as they happened or as they’ve been reshaped by longing, regret, and self-protection. The movie doesn’t need to turn that into a heavy-handed twist. Its instinct is to let the question sit beneath the comedy, making the title feel less like a clever label and more like a warning.

A dead self-help guru, a reward, a mysterious watch, and intentionally bad poetry are a lot of moving parts for a film that’s most effective when it’s watching two people try not to say the most important thing in the room. A few detours land more as texture than necessity, and there are moments when the mystery threatens to become less interesting than the silence between Kevin and Dani. That isn’t fatal, because the film’s emotional throughline is sturdy enough to pull the focus back where it belongs. But, in the end, the best film here is the connection and journey between the two, more so than the other things going on around them.

Cruz and Berryman are the reason that everything here holds together. Their chemistry isn’t built around romantic inevitability, which is refreshing. SOUVENIR has been described as a rom-com where the stakes are friendship, and that description fits (well, for the most part), as the film treats friendship with the seriousness that movies usually reserve for romance. Losing a friend can reorder your life in ways, especially when the friendship held some version of yourself you don’t know how to access anymore. Kevin and Dani aren’t simply deciding whether they want each other back in their lives. They’re testing whether the versions of themselves that existed together can survive contact with who they’ve become.

SOUVENIR works best as a film about the unfinished business of friendships. It understands that some people leave behind more than they know at the time. They leave stories, versions of themselves, and versions of us that can be hard to let go of because letting go would mean admitting the past won’t come back the way we remember it. Spencer’s debut feature has the charm of an adventure, but its emotional point is much simpler. Sometimes the hardest thing to return isn’t the wallet in your hand. It’s the truth you’ve been carrying for years.

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