A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is an odd but inviting experiment in romantic fantasy from Kogonada, perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance and a more offbeat surrealist sensibility. The film isn’t quite enough of either path, but there’s an honesty to its clean, airy mood. It follows two single adults in their forties who meet by chance—then perhaps by design: David, a man who is wary of commitment, and Sarah, who is cautious about investing in love. Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie give grounded performances that keep the emotion tethered, even as the film riffs on whimsy. The script by Seth Reiss, who co-wrote The Menu, threads introspection with dry humor as it probes why people tell themselves they are happier staying in their routines.
At the outset, David is on the road to an out-of-town wedding when his car is booted, forcing him to improvise. He discovers The Car Rental Agency, a cavernous operation run by two enigmatic figures—played with sly warmth by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge—who press him to rent a 1994 Saturn and to use an in-house GPS with a mind of its own. The GPS nudges him toward places that spark soliloquies about his upbringing, his teenage dreams, and his long-held belief that lasting love might elude him. He then meets Sarah at the wedding, and their flirtation is cautious; she signals she doesn’t want to rush into romance. They cross paths again when Sarah’s car breaks down near a Burger King, and she accepts a lift from David. The two begin a sequence of doors to nowhere, stepping through each doorway into moments that reveal what has kept them from committing: Sarah’s guilt over not being at her mother’s bedside when she died; David’s memory of a high school performance and the missed romance that followed. The device is quirky and sometimes heavy-handed, but it consistently nudges them toward vulnerability without abandoning warmth.
Stylistically, the film sits closer to dreamlike than literal surrealism, a fit with Kogonada’s prior work. After Yang and Columbus explored memory and longing in subtle, atmospheric ways, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey leans into stylized dreaminess and a crisp, almost cinematic transparency. Farrell lends David a quiet, searching energy as he recovers from the protective walls he has built; Robbie embodies Sarah’s self-loathing with a composed, haunted awareness. The result is a movie that can feel self-conscious at times and sentimental at others, yet it also carries an earnestness that can be hard to deny. Some critics have pointed to the title’s journey conceit as a potential pitfall, arguing the film occasionally tips into sentimentality. Others have embraced it as a refreshingly adult take on romance—an invitation to trust in a moment that might fracture and reform a relationship, even when both people are older and more cautious than the conventional rom-com protagonist.
The screenplay by Seth Reiss provides brisk humor and a steady beat even as the film indulges long stretches of reflection. The Car Rental Agency sequence, with its two quasi-mystical clerks and the GPS that acts as a narrative conduit, serves as a mechanism to revisit defining choices. The result is a cinematic mood piece that treats memory as something to be revisited, not simply recalled, and that asks whether people in midlife can still open themselves to possibility. The project reflects Kogonada’s broader interest in memory, time, and human connection, and it sits alongside his earlier, more meditative works as a distinct voice within contemporary Culture & Entertainment.
As a piece of romantic fantasy, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey may not align with every viewer’s expectations. It is, however, a brave experiment that asks audiences to stay with discomfort long enough to find its own form of clarity. For fans of performances that carry emotional weight and for those looking for cinema that mixes whimsy with introspection, the film offers an unconventional itinerary—one that lingers after the final frame and rewards those who are patient with mood, memory, and possibility.
