‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ Review: A GPS for Two Lost Souls

There are films that still manage to surprise us, even in an era when everything seems pre-digested, pre-tested, and carefully calibrated. Those surprises are not always pleasant, but they do leave you thinking—somewhere between bewilderment and disbelief—and asking yourself: who thought making this was a good idea? A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is very much one of those films.

Directed by Kogonada, a somewhat eccentric filmmaker who until now had delivered a couple of genuinely intriguing works like Columbus and After Yang, this romantic drama starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie does not feel like a failed personal passion project. Had it been something along those lines—as was the case with Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis—one might at least admire the risk, even if the results fell short. But that is not what this is. This feels like an attempt at a commercial film built around a glamorous star pairing. And the result is not only weak, but at times downright baffling.

What exactly is A Big Bold Beautiful Journey? Essentially, it is a series of illustrated vignettes that resemble an audiovisual self-help book: bite-sized life lessons dressed up as cinema. Or rather, not quite cinema at all, but a kind of studio-bound experiment (with sets that often look digitally layered) featuring two famous actors asked to emote without ever breaking a sweat or disturbing their impeccable looks. Moving through scenarios that belong equally to science fiction, magical realism, or the curated feed of an Instagram influencer, Kogonada seems to be reaching for films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Truman Show—stories that blend romance and fantasy—but he never quite finds the right tone or form. Since little to nothing actually works, the movie bogs itself down in an exhausting cycle of banal ideas stacked one on top of the other.

For about 20 or 25 minutes, it more or less holds together. You can tell Kogonada is operating on very thin ice, but the intrigue of the world he’s sketching out, combined with the natural charisma of his stars, makes it tolerable. Farrell plays David, a melancholic yet elegant man who needs to get a car to attend a distant wedding and ends up at a strange rental service run by an eccentric duo (Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline) who speak and behave as if they’ve just landed from another planet. There’s something overtly performative about their introduction, signaling to the audience that what follows will be, at the very least, odd. And odd it is. David rents the car, which comes equipped with a GPS—not one that merely gives driving directions, but one that offers guidance for life itself.

At the wedding, David meets the beautiful Sarah (Robbie), and the dynamic is one of simultaneous attraction and resistance. The resistance comes mostly from her: she explains that her romantic relationships always end badly—she’s usually the one who leaves or cheats—and tells David upfront that trying to win each other over simply isn’t worth the effort. Soon, however, it’s revealed that Sarah arrived in a similar car, suggesting that the AI controlling both GPS systems had already decided these two immaculate, magazine-cover-ready beings were destined to meet and live out their (im)possible love story in a dimension inaccessible to ordinary humans.

The film then focuses on their fraught return journey, each driving a separate car back to the same unnamed city—clearly New York, though never explicitly identified. Along the way, the GPS leads them through strange doors that appear out of nowhere, transporting them into scenes from their respective pasts. The mission is simple enough: to understand what, when, and how their lives “went off track,” undermining their ability to form healthy romantic relationships. This sends them back to childhood, adolescence, and specific turning points, always inhabiting their adult bodies as they relive difficult—and especially traumatic—moments from their histories. Most of these episodes fall somewhere between the predictable and the archetypal.

Beyond the film’s symbolic oddity, the problem is not necessarily the script—or at least not only the script. To turn this material into something cinematic, Kogonada seems to have decided it needed to be visually overloaded, landing somewhere between the elaborately designed fantasy of What Dreams May Come and the aesthetic of children’s illustrations. This look might be barely tolerable in a short film, a music video, or a social media reel, but it simply does not hold up over feature length. Or to put it bluntly: it takes considerably more talent than Kogonada possesses to pull this off.

The love story never truly clicks, the journeys into the past revolve around painfully obvious ideas, and while Robbie and Farrell initially command attention through sheer star power, they soon get swallowed by the dense, heavy ball of “trauma” prescribed by Seth Reiss’s screenplay—a script that, before production, was reportedly held in high regard around Hollywood. Both actors are attractive, charismatic, and well-versed in winning over an audience, but what never materializes here is any real connection between them. And without that, everything becomes even harder, especially in a film like this, which demands an unusually high level of suspended disbelief. It’s almost as if each of them is following a separate GPS—one that keeps trying to bring them together but is clearly malfunctioning.

There is, buried somewhere in the film, an interesting and potentially unsettling idea about the use of AI to organize romantic matches. Presumably this already exists in some form, and the movie—perhaps unintentionally, since the script likely predates the recent explosion of this technology—pushes it into the realm of fantasy. But instead of exploring the real implications and complications of such a system, Kogonada and his team use it as an excuse to stage a series of quasi-detective therapy sessions centered on “finding the trauma.” The destination is as predictable and lifeless as the film’s lone kiss between its protagonists—possibly one of the least romantic expressions of affection ever put on screen.