It could be said that Joanna Hogg’s oeuvre is the heir to a particular way of making film, specific to the context in which she was born, studied and has worked in throughout her life. But it could also be said that her work stands out precisely for the way it unpicks those questions of form and writing typical of the British directorial tradition, inside and outside the cinema. It is through this paradoxical attitude — challenging certain conventions, revelling in others — that her films emerge and take on new life, revealing an exciting and meticulous cinematographic practice that has only grown since 2007, the year of her first feature film.

The short film Caprice (1986), a fiery post-modern fantasy about fashion that she directed in the final year of film school (steeped in New Romanticism, reminding us of the videoclips of Steve Strange and Blitz Club), led to a long career in television lasting more than three decades.

This experience left an indelible mark on her early work, which displays vestiges — both formal and dramaturgical — of the world of television production. Once again, this is far from unusual in its context, if we consider what the grand masters of British cinema learnt from the BBC over the years and brought over into their films — from Mike Leigh to Ken Loach. It’s just that, in Hogg’s case, this transition was far more prolonged than the norm.

But perhaps it is in the conflict between different ideas of cinema — the conventional and televisual, from which she sought to liberate herself and which, to a certain extent, she tried to subvert — that Hogg found her early creative space, her first language, strange in certain ways that may confuse those of us seeking patterns, but which captured the imagination of audiences from the word go. Her first feature film, Unrelated (2007), told the story of tension at the core of a family on holiday in an Italian village, and was welcomed by viewers and festivals alike as a bold, refreshing and convincing film portrait.

Hogg’s films offer personal and family dramas echoing modes of intimacy that are in some measure similar to those we find in canonical works of film and theatre in the UK. Her characters come together at the dinner table, in the living room, they argue in the kitchen. The bedroom can be a battleground. With or without sex. Her stories unfold in the domestic sphere, in private. On various levels they remind us of the Kitchen Sink dramas of the new wave of cinema and theatre in early 1960s England. However, the social class being portrayed is quite different, the rooms and house decorations too, and the dramas revolve around women almost without exception.

The director places herself in her zone of social comfort, that of a privileged class who she observes without irony and with careful realism. Dramatic events are psychological, emotional, affective, even artistic, but far from economic concerns — like those that browbeat the working classes and have been portrayed by another type of realism still alive in British cinema today. Her portrayal of characters and settings, often subject to televisual forms of writing, blends uncompromising technical and visual techniques with “commercial” directorial methods. There are those who find in her cold, naturalist approach, anchored by technical simplicity especially with respect to lighting, a kind of emotional detachment; and there are others who find themselves absorbed by a kind of sensorial sophistication. All very British, then.

Souvenir I and Souvenir: Part II mark the beginning of a new chapter in her film practice, earlier prefigured by her third film, Exhibition — the raw, sexually intricate diary of the dysfunctional relationship between two artists (played by Viv Albertine, guitarist from The Slits, and the artist Liam Gillick). In these works, we find a different kind of filming, a new plasticity. In these semi-autobiographical dramas about a film student navigating between the art world and her privileged, upper-class upbringing, Hogg beautifully captures the generation and culture (including the music) of the 1980s, through a less contradictory kind of filmmaking that is more aligned with certain conventions — making both films easier for the audience to get along with as a result.

But it is not as if her confessional rhetoric devices, her fixed shots, or the naturalism and duration of dialogue between characters have been lost. Nor does she fail to place us in the sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes exciting position of voyeurs observing hyper-realistic interactions between individuals and couples, where the female figure still drives forwards the narrative logic. Here, just as in Exhibition, we find a certain reflection of “Eurydice” in the poetry of Hilda Doolittle, where the central character argues against the skewed and obfuscating arrogance of her partner.

The relationship between the same mother and daughter from Souvenir, now older, forms the premise for her latest acclaimed film. The Eternal Daughter, a phantasmagorical story in which Tilda Swinton doubles up in the two central roles of mother and daughter, is a wandering, existentialist film shot and manipulated immaculately on digital, now free of the seemingly detached, naturalist tone of the earlier films. With this work, Hogg also leaves behind the warm, sensual, granular experience of Souvenirs. And thus renews, once again, her cinematic language.

And, so, with her filmography of six feature films, Joanna Hogg has proven that she is a restless, surprisingly experimental filmmaker. While the themes and settings she embraces are well-known, she has made them squarely her own, approaching them in a courageously critical way and shrewdly reconstructing them, step by step, since 2007.