A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)
Cinema often tries to remind us of what we already know. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it bludgeons us with its insistence. Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey manages to do something rarer: it offers a story that feels like a rediscovery. Not a sermon in disguise, not a collection of set-pieces stitched together, but a meditation wrapped in romance, with a curious mechanism at its centre.
The premise is disarmingly simple. Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) meet at a wedding, two solitary figures orbiting other people’s happiness. Then the odd detail: David’s car, an unremarkable 1996 model, has a GPS system that does not direct him to petrol stations or motels but to doors—literal portals—into the past. These are not portals in the sci-fi sense, with sparks and spectacle, but rooms, lighthouses, theatres, even the echo of a childhood museum. Through them, both Sarah and David step into fragments of their earlier lives and, by extension, into each other’s. The film plays this conceit without irony, though not without humour.
In my opinion its power lies less in the concept itself than in the restraint with which Kogonada handles it. The camera lingers not on special effects but on faces, gestures, the weather of a moment. A laugh between strangers, a glance in a corridor—these feel as consequential as the doors themselves. Benjamin Loeb’s cinematography keeps returning us to textures: rain on glass, dim stairwells, the trembling outline of a theatre curtain. The effect is both expansive and intimate, as though one were leafing through a photo album that occasionally answers back.
The performances ground the film. Robbie allows Sarah’s guarded intelligence to surface without announcing itself, while Farrell gives David a blend of awkward humour and subdued yearning. Their chemistry is not showy, and that is precisely what makes it convincing. Supporting turns are deployed with care: Kevin Kline as an older confidant, Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a cameo that all but steals the frame, offering wit without derailing the tone.
If the film falters, it does so in the middle stretch. A series of memory-vignettes begins to feel like variations on a theme, interesting but not essential. One or two explanations about how this portal-system functions attempt to pin down what should remain suggestive. The script occasionally instructs when it could have trusted the audience to wander. These detours are noticeable but not ruinous.
Kogonada, as ever, is interested in how memory shapes identity, how our sense of self is a collage rather than a monolith. The film avoids the easy fantasy of a “second chance.” Sarah and David do not get to rewrite their pasts. They must bear them, and decide whether they can step forward together knowing those burdens. The story hints that renewal is possible, but only through honesty, not erasure.
There are touches of sly humour—Farrell, for instance, forced into reprising a high-school musical number he once tried to forget, sings with embarrassment that is almost endearing. Even the GPS voice, oddly philosophical at times, seems to mock the urge to control the narrative too neatly. These moments of levity prevent the film from collapsing into solemnity.
By its close, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey does not offer certainties. What it does offer is rarer: an invitation to hold our memories with both suspicion and affection, and to consider that love is not about escaping history but learning how to inhabit it differently.