As Joanna Hogg entered the··room assigned for our interview, on the top floor of a downtown Glasgow hotel, she muttered in a movie-trailer-like voice, “The Penthouse!”, and laughed quietly to herself.

With only two films on her CV, Hogg is hardly a veteran director. Yet her first film, Unrelated, brings to life all of the vague terms we use to describe excellent films: complex, emotionally accurate, technically effective, involving, subtle…·what would be a pretentious description of another film, when applied to Unrelated, becomes simply accurate.

No less should be expected from Archipelago, her second film.Archipelago tells the story of a family holiday; Unrelated is about an English woman’s trip to Tuscany. I wondered what it is about travel that appeals to Hogg. “Something happens to families on holiday”, she says. “I think it has to do with the pressure of wanting to be happy and have a good time as a family, which is a terrible start for any situation”. Pressure is a conviction from the start in Unrelated too, where Anna, the main character, is looking for solace from a crisis. Travelling mixes the bitter-sweet ingredients of pressure and escape, euphoria and depression – and cooks up tension.

And tension is what you get within and between characters. Hogg’s emotional portrayals felt too astute not to be true, so, at the risk of getting to close for comfort, I asked: how does she negotiate between protecting herself and those around her while also digging her mind and theirs? Hogg has an emotional property rights approach to writing. She is wary of “stealing from people’s personalities”. Her solution is to make different characters out of her own multiple, contradictory self. But the characters have to be complex in their own right. The recipe sounded somewhat simple. But then why is it that most directors end up with deflated flans while she makes a plump soufflé?