The Travellers (2025)

Bruce Beresford’s latest film feels a bit like watching someone return to their childhood home only to realise they’ve forgotten why they left in the first place. There’s affection here, certainly. Nostalgia, perhaps. But also a nagging sense that this homecoming might have been better left as an idea rather than a two-hour commitment.

Stephen Seary (Luke Bracey) is a stage designer who has built himself a tidy European career, far from his small West Australian town. When his mother falls ill, he flies back to Yarrabiddy for what should be a quick farewell. Instead, he finds himself trapped in the orbit of family dysfunction: his father Fred (Bryan Brown) living in squalor, his sister Nikki (Susie Porter) managing everything with quiet exhaustion, and a string of old flames and unresolved conflicts that seem determined to derail his escape back to the opera houses of Europe.

On paper, this should work. The tension between creative ambition and family duty is rich territory, particularly now when geography scatters families across continents and small towns hollow out into weekend getaways for city folk. Beresford knows this landscape, both literally and emotionally. He’s not wrong about what he’s trying to say.

The problem is how he says it. Or rather, how he has his characters say it. The dialogue doesn’t so much flow as announce itself in tidy paragraphs. People explain their motivations with the kind of clarity that simply doesn’t happen in real families, where resentments simmer wordlessly for decades and important things go unsaid until it’s far too late. The script treats subtext as if it were an inconvenience best dispensed with.

Peter James’ cinematography deserves considerable praise, rendering Western Australia’s landscapes with genuine beauty. There are moments when the film almost transcends its structural problems through sheer visual grace. The way late afternoon light falls across weathered verandahs. The particular desolation of a family home sliding into decay. These images carry weight that the screenplay sometimes cannot.

Bryan Brown does something remarkable with Fred. Playing the archetypal grumpy, blokey dad with gruff charisma, he finds truth in what could easily have become caricature. You believe his resistance to help, his stubborn insistence that he’s managing fine when clearly he isn’t. Brown makes Fred feel like someone you might know, or someone your own father might become. It’s the film’s strongest thread, which makes it frustrating that Beresford doesn’t trust it more.

Porter brings warmth to Nikki, though the role essentially asks her to be the sensible one who holds everything together. She does it well. You just wish she had more to do than facilitate other people’s epiphanies.

And then there’s Stephen. Look, I understand the impulse to create a flawed protagonist. Complexity is good. But there’s complexity and there’s watching someone betray his partner multiple times, neglect his dying mother for work calls, and condescend to everyone in his hometown without any meaningful reckoning. The film seems to think Stephen is charming in that roguish, European sophisticate way. I found him exhausting. Perhaps that’s intentional. Perhaps Beresford wants us to question this character’s choices. But the script never quite commits to that critique, leaving us in an uncomfortable middle ground where we’re not sure if we’re meant to like this person or simply endure him.

The opera sequences reveal Beresford’s genuine passion for the art form, which is touching. Less convincing are scenes asking us to believe a livestreamed Verdi performance would captivate an outback pub. The intention to bridge high culture and regional Australia is admirable. The execution requires the kind of suspension of disbelief usually reserved for superhero films.

There’s a decent film somewhere in The Travellers. It’s there in Brown’s performance, in the cinematography, in the film’s understanding that families fracture and small towns fade and people age ungracefully when left alone. But it never quite coheres. The pieces sit alongside each other without fully connecting, like family members at an awkward reunion making conversation that never moves past pleasantries.

At 97 minutes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. That’s something. Beresford has made far better films, and at 85, he’s earned the right to make whatever he likes. This one just feels like a missed opportunity. The bones of something meaningful are visible throughout, but the film never quite builds them into a structure that holds.

In my opinion, The Travellers works best when it forgets about its protagonist and focuses on the people he’s left behind. It’s in those margins that the film finds whatever truth it manages to tell.