A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY - Mark Reviews Movies

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Sony Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey dares to be surreal and sentimental, and the gamble of Seth Reiss' screenplay pays off, especially when the film cuts through its in-your-face artifice to get at some truths about these characters and bigger ideas about life. The artifice of director Kogonada's film, by the way, is also fine and, at times, ambitious in its own way, which makes it much easier to accept the gimmick of this narrative.

Initially, the whole thing feels like a fairly straightforward romantic comedy. We meet David (Colin Farrell), a man who's lonely and apparently unlucky in love, as he's preparing to attend the wedding of a friend on his own. A string of coincidences—a boot on his car tire, a flyer on a nearby wall advertising a car rental service, an imminent rainstorm—send David to a shady-looking business in an alleyway. He does need a car to get out of the city and into the countryside for the wedding, after all.

It turns out to be an even stranger place inside, with a clerk (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who runs the business almost like an audition, complete with headshots of David that he doesn't remember taking, and a mechanic (played by Kevin Kline) who adds to the clerk's little speech about how performance and truth can co-exist. Eventually, David is on the road with a GPS system (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) that the clerk basically forced on him. All of this will become important to one degree or another soon enough.

The romantic-comedy angle is that David meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), also single and flying solo, at the wedding. The two hit it off well enough, because the two actors are charming and the banter Reiss has devised for them is a bit revealing in its playful evasiveness. Sarah, for example, says that she believes marriage isn't for her—for reasons she doesn't want to get into with a man she just met. Meanwhile, David's earliest memory of knowing what he wanted from life was a school assignment in which he drew himself as a father. For whatever reason he won't say, he tells Sarah that he simply hasn't found the right person to marry and with whom to start a family yet.

Nothing comes of the pair's interactions at the wedding, but the GPS has something else in mind for the two of them anyway. It asks David if he wants to go on a "big, bold beautiful journey," and he accepts. At first stop at a fast-food joint off the highway, David spots Sarah sitting in another booth. They talk some more, and then, Sarah's car won't start. David's GPS system tells him to give her a ride, and from there, the two are off on a joint journey.

There are strange details here, such as mysterious doors standing in the middle of nowhere and a sort-of time-travel conceit that places each of the two in important moments of their respective lives, but they're grounded in some kind of emotional reality. David, for example, winds up a teenager again, albeit in his adult body, on opening night of the school musical in which he starred. Sarah finds herself at an art museum, where she and her mother (played by Lily Rabe) would visit at night on a monthly basis until the mother's death.

Kogonada infuses a love for art and creative energy in these scenes, from the highs of David not missing a beat in remembering his song-and-dance numbers—juxtaposed with the lows of his teenage self having his heart broken by his co-star—to the flashlight-lit tour of the museum's galleries. Soon enough, the two find themselves in a bare theater, where Sarah has to ready herself for a different kind of performance—re-creating the moment when she learned her mother had died.

That's the film's turning point—when it goes from using its central gimmick for breezy nostalgia to imagining it as the means of understanding these characters on a deeper level. In reality, Sarah wasn't at the hospital when she discovered her beloved mother was dead, but this doorway gives her the chance to be. At the same time, David finds himself in a different hospital waiting room, where his worried father (played by Hamish Linklater) explains to this, in the father's eyes, stranger how his son was born prematurely.

Whether or not Reiss' assorted flashbacks and re-imagined moments from the past here add up to some cohesive narrative or thematic whole, there's little denying the emotional potency of watching a daughter attempt to find unattained closure in her mother's death or of witnessing a son comfort his father in a way the man surely comforted him too many times to count. Indeed, it's these two scenes, as well as a couple of others in which these child-parent relationships are explored from completely different angles, that are the most compelling and emotionally resonant. A scene in which David and Sarah confront former romantic partners (played by Sarah Gadon and Billy Magnussen) gets at some cold, hard truths about these characters, but they pale in comparison.

That might be why A Big Bold Beautiful Journey isn't quite convincing as a romance, which is certainly where it's going as soon as David and Sarah have that first, fateful meeting. To be clear, the love story here is equally pleasant and honest, because we do get a sense of these two beneath the surfaces—the performances, if you will—of who they present themselves to be. The film, though, has grander ambitions and ideas apart from some convenient romance, and when it dares to embrace and explore those, it is quite effective and even more affecting.

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