Cinema, at its most persuasive, convinces us to surrender to the improbable. The swooning dissolve into romance, the portal into memory, the unseen forces guiding strangers toward one another — these are tropes as old as the medium itself, and audiences happily go along when the craft seduces rather than coerces. Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, however, never achieves that spell. Instead, it offers a melancholy fantasia whose wistful intentions collapse under the weight of mismatched tone, an undernourished script, and a curiously chilly romantic center.
At first glance, the film seems primed to enchant. The posters shimmer with pastel color blocks; the cast list boasts Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, actors whose mere pairing ought to generate chemistry from thin air. And the premise — two emotionally scarred loners stumble into a road trip where each “door” leads to a formative moment from their past — is ripe for a marriage of surrealism and sentiment. One thinks of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or even the bittersweet playfulness of Jacques Demy. Yet what emerges is a muddled hybrid of cerebral allegory and wan romance, its conceptual ambition undercut by narrative inertia and tonal indecision.
We meet David (Farrell), whose car has been booted on the day of a friend’s wedding. His detour to a surreal car rental warehouse — a cavernous space presided over by a bickering duo (Kevin Kline, mild, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, antic) — promises a Lynchian detour into eccentricity. They insist he rent a car with a peculiar GPS system, voiced with velvet inflection by Jodie Turner-Smith. Soon Sarah (Robbie), traveling to the same nuptials, rents the twin vehicle. Their collision, literal and emotional, seems inevitable.
From the outset, the script by Seth Reiss (The Menu) reveals its precarious balance: arch humor sits uneasily alongside gestures toward grief and regret. A flirtation that should ignite — Sarah and David speculating, half-jokingly, about who would betray the other first — instead lands as schematic, a cartoon of intimacy rather than its expression. Kogonada, who in Columbus and After Yang excelled at distilling silence into lyricism, applies the same hushed aesthetic here, but the material begs for bold stylistic flourishes, not restraint. Where Reiss imagines a heightened, whimsical cosmology of doors, Kogonada supplies hushed melancholy. The result is neither fish nor fowl, an ungainly fusion of conceptual play and inert romance.
The “door” conceit should serve as the film’s emotional engine. Each threshold opens into a memory: David’s premature birth, Sarah’s absent mother, the adolescent humiliation of an unreciprocated crush during a high school musical. Conceptually, these tableaux are invitations for catharsis, the cinematic equivalent of couples therapy via time travel. But the execution is curiously lifeless. Scenes unfold with little world-building or psychological depth; characters accept the surreal mechanics without question, stripping the device of wonder or terror. The viewer, too, is never granted the satisfaction of rules or logic — the doors simply appear, are walked through, and vanish, as if conjured not by memory but by screenplay convenience.
Robbie and Farrell work valiantly within this unstable framework. Farrell, one of the most versatile actors of his generation, imbues David with a tender ache, particularly when revisiting his father (Hamish Linklater) in the hospital where he was born. Robbie’s Sarah, in a striped silk ensemble that suggests bohemian insouciance, conveys flickers of guilt when confronting her failure to be present at her mother’s deathbed. Yet together, they feel strangely remote. Their conversations circle themes of commitment, betrayal, and self-sabotage, but the dialogue — brittle, schematic, full of pronouncements rather than discoveries — stifles the possibility of chemistry. What should be a gradual blossoming of vulnerability instead reads as two beautiful actors reciting aphorisms in adjacent emotional registers.
Occasional set pieces suggest the film that might have been. A re-staged production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — with Farrell gamely returning to the humiliations of his teenage self — injects a jolt of theatrical exuberance. A modest dinner of mashed potatoes with Sarah’s mother briefly anchors the film in tactile emotion. And cinematographer Benjamin Loeb finds moments of visual poetry: rain-slicked streets reflecting balloons and umbrellas that evoke The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, shafts of light cutting across lonely diners and school gyms. Joe Hisaishi’s score, too, attempts to thread whimsy into melancholy, though even his elegant orchestrations cannot disguise the film’s lack of tonal cohesion.
The deeper problem lies in the film’s refusal to interrogate its own conceit. If strangers truly wandered through doors to their formative traumas, would they not resist, question, recoil? Instead, David and Sarah drift from portal to portal as though they were tourists in a theme park of memory. The absence of dramatic friction drains the journey of urgency. Unlike Charlie Kaufman’s Memoryscapes, which teem with surreal dissonance, or Richard Linklater’s romances, which thrive on verbal spontaneity, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey settles for schematic encounters that neither deepen character nor advance romance.
Comparison to contemporaries underscores its shortcomings. Both The Life of Chuck and We Live in Time — imperfect films that also grapple with mortality and regret — nonetheless pulse with emotional sincerity. Kogonada’s film, by contrast, maintains a studied distance, as though terrified of sentimentality. The irony is that this very restraint renders it sentimental in the worst way: manipulative without catharsis, mournful without vulnerability
One cannot entirely fault the supporting cast, though most are stranded in cameo purgatory. Waller-Bridge, whose comedic energy could have served as tonal ballast, is reduced to brittle banter. Kline exudes warmth but is dispatched too quickly. Lily Rabe, as Sarah’s mother, flickers briefly before disappearing into memory. It is left to Robbie and Farrell to shoulder the burden, and while their professionalism never falters, the romance between Sarah and David feels more like a theoretical construct than a lived experience.
In the final act, the film gestures toward transcendence: the lovers, finally acknowledging their fears, are meant to step through one last door together, leaving behind solitude and regret. Yet the moment arrives unearned, hollow, and curiously perfunctory. By then, the viewer has long since ceased believing in their union, or in the metaphysics that brought them here.
The tragedy of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is not its failure to enchant, but its squandered potential. The idea of mapping a romance through the cartography of memory is rich with possibility. To imagine lovers confronting each other’s ghosts, stepping literally into the rooms of trauma and joy, could have yielded a romance both epic and intimate. Instead, Kogonada and Reiss deliver a film at war with itself: whimsical premise, dour execution; fantasy mechanics, arthouse solemnity. What remains is an oddly airless experience, a film that insists upon its big, bold beauty but delivers only minor, muted melancholy.
One leaves not with swooning admiration but with a sigh, recalling the maxim that great cinema persuades us to believe in impossible things. Here, the impossible remains stubbornly unpersuasive.
Running time: 108 minutes.
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