THE MAP THAT LEADS TO YOU - Mark Reviews Movies

The Map That Leads to You, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 20, 2025

The thing about modern romance stories is that they only seem interested in operating in one of two modes. There are the comedies, in which a couple meets in an improbably cute way before some contrived stuff temporarily gets in the way of the happy ending, and then, there's the other brand. It's drama, of course, but more specifically tragedy, because of a very particular reason that, to mention it, would probably be considered a spoiler for The Map That Leads to You.

With that in mind, it's almost impossible not to see the big twist of Les Bohem and Vera Herbert's screenplay, based on the novel by J.P. Monninger, coming around the start of the second act. It probably shouldn't be played as a surprise in the first place—not only because it is so blatantly obvious, but also on account of the fact that the filmmakers might have been able to tell an actual story if they weren't so cagey about trying to hide the truth of what's actually happening here.

Instead, we mostly get a romantic comedy, helped mostly by the European setting of its travelogue plot. The main couple travel the continent, see the sights, and take in the rich history and optimistic future of these locales. Occasionally, they talk about each other—their pasts and their plans, or the lack thereof, for their own futures—and have sweet kisses, warm embraces, and tender sex, in which body parts and sheets offer some modesty to the proceedings. These two, in other words, aren't nearly interesting enough to compete with what's there in the background.

One part of the inevitable couple is Heather (Madelyn Cline), a Texas-born-and-bred young woman who's about to start a well-paying job at a Wall Street bank. She and her two best friends, Connie (Sofia Wylie) and Amy (Madison Thompson), are in the middle of one last adventure before real life starts for Heather at least, and on a train from Paris to Barcelona, the three women meet three different guys. Forget two of them, because one of those just offers a little subplot and the other is ultimately quite convenient for revealing that final turn of the story.

The important one is Jack (KJ Apa), a young man from New Zealand who has been backpacking around Europe, following the same path his great-grandfather took and wrote about in his journal. Heather is all about making plans, knowing what's coming next, and trying to maintain some sort of control over her life. Jack is quite the opposite—mostly aimless and carefree and spontaneous. Their cute little meeting happens when Jack decides to try falling asleep on the baggage rack above the three friends' seats on the train, for example, where he just happens to notice (Sure, guy) that Heather is reading the same book he is.

By the rules of romance stories, this means the two are destined to be together for at least the length of the movie. They spend it wandering the streets of Barcelona and other European cities or towns, because he convinces her that she should really take advantage of this chance while she has it. The future isn't guaranteed, after all, and while everyone in the audience will probably have figured out what's actually going on with Jack before he starts talking in such not-so-cryptic riddles, Heather doesn't catch on to much, if anything, that he's all but shouting between the lines.

Director Lasse Hallström's movie is probably best watched as a travelogue, because it does have some lovely things to see in Barcelona, as well as the famous running of the bulls in Pamplona, along with later stops in a couple of Portuguese cities and some backtracking to Rome, because no cross-European vacation in the movies is complete with that city. We're not here for the characters, to be sure, because they're just going through the motions of a shallow love story on the trek.

They're so hollow that the pair's one real argument, before the movie starts veering toward its second mode, has Heather calling Jack a hypocrite for criticizing people who focus on taking photographs of the sights instead of, you know, actually taking them in at that moment. She says his great-grandfather's private journal is basically the same thing as social media pages filled with selfies, and it's tough to determine who's more wrong here: Heather for making that comparison or Jack for quickly believing it possesses merit.

To be fair, that scene is probably the only time the two are overtly irritating, apart from Jack's constant evasiveness and Heather's inability to catch on to what he's saying by not saying it. The Map That Leads to You could have been worse, in other words, but instead, it's just a bland, generic romance that, if it had been more direct upfront about its ultimate intentions, could have been much better, too.

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