A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY (2025)
Two strangers who meet at a mutual friend's wedding have the chance to relive important moments from their pasts.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a Charlie Kaufman-esque love story from South Korean-born filmmaker Kogonada. The high-concept romance follows two people who are bad at relationships for different reasons as they try to overcome their past trauma through mysterious doors. David (Colin Farrell) is on his way to a wedding when his car gets clamped, forcing him to hire another vehicle from a mysterious company. Said company (with a desk manned by Kevin Kline and a German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge) runs out of a mysteriously empty warehouse and forces customers to hire a 1994 Saturn with a GPS upgrade.
At his friend’s wedding, he meets Sarah (Margot Robbie) in a toe-cringingly saccharine meet-cute. David\s charming and puppy dog-eyed for this Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who promises she’s going to ruin his life. She asks him to marry her despite not believing in marriage, but he says no, although all he has ever wanted was a wife and kids. When he turns down a dance with Sarah, he spends the rest of the night regretting it.
David and Sarah are both self-confessed bad at love. He’s emotionally unreachable and walks away when things get serious. She’s a chronic cheater who runs away when people get too close to her real self. Their problems are rooted in their childhood traumas, and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey takes a unique approach in exploring their scars.
When Sarah’s hire car breaks down on the way home from the wedding, David’s GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) comes alive and takes him to her. The GPS takes over the pair’s journey, taking them on a mission to move towards self-forgiveness and self-love. They must reach their inner zen by going through mysterious doors scattered around the landscape. The film is ultimately less eccentric than the premise promises.
These doors take them to special moments in their life, starting at a lighthouse David visited to have an epiphany, only to realise he was not having an epiphany. They then attend a modern art gallery beloved by Sarah’s late mother (Lily Rabe). Some of the moments behind the doors are revisiting painful moments from the past, while others are redos of missed opportunities. It’s a concept that will have you thinking about your own past and what you would do differently.
In the film’s best scene, a door leads David and Sarah to his high school on the night his heart is broken after a performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The film puts on a Broadway-level performance of the musical, with Farrell singing and dancing his way through the high school show alongside a group of talented, age-appropriate teens. It’s criminal that Farrell hasn’t had more chances in his career to be the song-and-dance man.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is best when it forces the leads to confront their relationship with their parents instead of with each other. Sarah visits her mother’s hospital room in her last moments and enjoys reliving those special childhood moments you never fully appreciated at the time. David, whose past is a little less complex, meets his father (a scene-stealing Hamish Linklater) in the hospital waiting room. Linklater delivers more heart in this one scene, as a father whose son’s in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), than anyone else in the entire film. In a later scene, David enters his childhood home as his father and must give his teenage self words of wisdom.
The romantic aspects of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey never land as well as they should. Robbie and Farrell’s chemistry is severely lacking, and their potential as soulmates is not entirely convincing. Sarah and David are far more interesting characters when apart and facing their own past than when looking at the future together. The romantic dialogue between the possible couple is one of the cringiest moments in the film.
One door leads David and Sarah to their exes (Sarah Gadon, Billy Magnussen) and forces them to confront the sins of their past romances. This should have been a pivotal scene in understanding David and Sarah and why they acted the way they did during the meeting. However, the uneven writing and annoying character stereotypes just make the leads seem even more unlikeable. The set-up, where the two couples argue over each other at the same table, is overwhelming, and details get lost in the chaos.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey suffers from being style over substance. It’s a beautiful-looking film that beautifully shoots beautiful people saying bad dialogue. Benjamin Loeb’s cinematography is stunning, mimicking classic old films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and David Hockney’s paintings. But there’s an essence that the film chooses looking good over putting heart into the script. Time is spent following yellow umbrellas from above and watching the stars instead of exploring the characters and their story.
Seth Reiss’ screenplay is tooth-achingly saccharine in places. Farrell has the natural charm to make even the cheesiest dialogue sound sincere, but Robbie doesn’t quite have the same skills. With an uneven American accent, she can’t save her clichéd flighty woman, who’s scared of becoming attached, from being annoying. There are numerous moments where Sarah isn’t quirky or whimsical; she’s a heartbroken woman whose trauma is played as eccentricity. Robbie is much better at playing the sad Sarah than the quirky Sarah, holding her breath in the car and kicking her shoes off to dance.
For a film about scratching beneath the surface of people, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey fails to scratch at the veneer of its own whimsy. The story glides through different doors and moments in time without wanting to get its teeth into any specific topic or tone. David and Sarah go from door to door, often with no context or development in between. Audiences can guess how reliving their past will change them, yet this development is not always shown on-screen.
While the film wants to have the tragic fantasy of Being John Malkovich (1999) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), it avoids embracing the fantastical elements. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is too weird and too understated at the same time. If Kogonada wanted to make a full-on fantastical film, he should have pushed the strangeness even further instead of sitting in an uncanny middle ground. The opening scene with Kline and Waller-Bridge in the empty hire company building promises a weirder ride than the one audiences ultimately get.
The director’s previous features, Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021), both left lasting impressions with their unique approach to storytelling and visual craftsmanship. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey lacks the introspection and heart of Kogonada’s previous work, perhaps because he’s not adapting his own script. This movie is severely let down by poor writing, cheesy dialogue, and an unbelievable love story between two actors desperately trying to make the material work.
IRELAND • USA | 2025 | 109 MINUTES | 2.00:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
director: Kogonada.
writer: Seth Reiss.
starring: Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith (voice), Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Brandon Perea, Chloe East & Hamish Linklater.
