by Charles Kirkland, Jr.
Two strangers meet at a wedding and then take an unbelievable trip in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
The story opens with David (Colin Farrell), dressed for a wedding, standing beside his booted car. In a moment of comic frustration that becomes eerily serendipitous, he notices an ad for The Car Rental Company plastered to a nearby wall. Soon, he’s driving away in their only vehicle: a rusted 1994 Saturn, outfitted with a curiously insistent GPS. At the reception, he meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), who reveals she too rented an identical Saturn, complete with the same strange, sentient-feeling navigation system. Before long, the two find themselves following the GPS as it guides David and Sarah not just across physical terrain, but through metaphysical ones, to strange doors in unexpected places. Each leading them into pivotal, unresolved moments from their lives.
Written by Seth Reiss, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a fantasy romance movie that stars Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kevin Kline, and Jodie Turner-Smith. The up-and-coming Korean-born legend Kogonada directs the film.
While Journey is cinematic in its scope and rich in visual symbolism, it is also startlingly theatrical. Kogonada leans into the stripped-back artifice of a stage play, with sparse sets and choreographed movement that evoke black-box theater rather than Hollywood realism. Some sequences veer into full-blown musical numbers (one entire act is a high school production, complete with student chorus), yet none of it feels jarring. Instead, these moments amplify the film’s emotional resonance, reminding us that life, memory, and love are all performances in their own way.
Farrell and Robbie are nothing short of electric. Their chemistry hums with both friction and longing. They sing, they dance, they argue, they ache through scenes where the world falls away and it’s just the two of them under a spotlight or others where each of them is placed in moments of their pasts, like two souls caught in an existential duet. Their push-and-pull dynamic captures the pain of two people who might be perfect for each other, if only they weren’t so afraid of what that might mean.
The doors David and Sarah encounter operate less like plot devices and more like metaphors: portals into their unresolved selves. One leads David to a childhood moment with his estranged father. Another force Sarah to relive a career decision that derailed her passion. Each “stop” is an intimate, vulnerable, unflinching mirror into their characters. It’s in these spaces that the film quietly asks its central question, “Can love bloom between two people who haven’t yet finished becoming who they are?”
It would be easy to compare Journey to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Science of Sleep, and while those influences linger, Kogonada’s film is uniquely its own. It feels more meditative, more theatrical, and visually restrained in a way that makes every image feel like a painting. His use of negative space, carefully composed symmetry, and light turns the mundane into the mythic. A car idling under a streetlamp becomes a cathedral. A roadside diner becomes a memory palace. Rain forms a curtain that opens and closes over the story like the snow in It’s A Wonderful Life.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t feel like a movie in the traditional sense. It feels like a dream you share with someone you love. It is strange, beautiful, and so emotionally precise it aches. It is a romantic film, but not a conventional one. It’s about falling in love with someone else while finally, maybe, learning to love yourself.
With unforgettable performances by Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, and Kogonada’s masterful direction, this is more than just a film. It is a meditation. A visual poem. A bold, beautiful journey inward.
Rated R for language, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a singularly hypnotic romantic fantasy, part stage play, part road trip, part surreal (and uncomfortable) therapy session, and all incredibly adorable.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is in theaters starting September 19, 2025.
Grade: B
