6.5

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Is an Engaging Road Trip Until It Crashes Out

By Tara Bennett  |  September 18, 2025 | 1:30pm
Movies Reviews a big bold beautiful journey
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Is an Engaging Road Trip Until It Crashes Out

As an aficionado of talky cinematic romances, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey arrives with the beguiling alchemy of an odd premise married with fantastic actors that make me hopeful for something great. It centers on two fate-connected strangers who lock eyes at a wedding and end up going on a magical realism road trip together. Margot Robbie is sassy and sharp as Sarah, while Colin Farrell is the quiet, closet romantic David. They have immediate chemistry, but so much emotional baggage you worry about their rental car trunk space.

Kogonada (Pachinko) directs his charismatic leads (and quirky supporting cameos from Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) through an amusing and whimsical playground literally comprised of random doors that will lead them to share festering past regrets, ongoing moments of self-sabotage, and confront their own burgeoning attraction along the way. The majority of the film unfolds as a witty, two-hander play as Sarah and David give themselves over to the omniscience of a rental car GPS (voiced by an enigmatic Jodie Turner-Smith). It’s persuasive in offering them a big, bold, beautiful journey, which they accept, so set out to follow a mystery itinerary programmed just for them.

Although the premise teeters on being twee, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mostly works because its self-awareness keeps it from devolving into cliche … until it doesn’t. Unfortunately, the emotional throughline for Sarah and David falls apart in the last leg as screenwriter Seth Reiss makes a maddening decision to separate them when it matters most, and then hurriedly bring them together for an ending so jarring and separate from what came before, that I can only assume it was the product of enforced reshoot shenanigans.

Going in, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey requires its audience to give itself over to what will unfold with the same kind of trust it asks of Sarah and David. If you can do that, there’s plenty to enjoy and explore with these two as they meet at the wedding reception of mutual friends. They immediately fall into the kind of heightened dialogue that only works if the assigned actors are talented enough to sell it with their whole selves, and Robbie and Farrell do just that with plenty of charm and aplomb. Their conversations carry them (and us) through the film’s overall weirdness featuring strange downpours, that sentient GPS and those destination doors that conceal pivotal moments in their lives they must revisit, or relive. But the perk of not being able to hide your past means you can eschew all the performance art of early dating and get right into the meaty, real stuff that you usually hide away until you can’t anymore. And watching them experience that together is often magical.

Each pitstop gives Kogonada the opportunity to put his deep cinematic knowledge to full use, from his use of rain and color block umbrellas plucked right from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) to his cheeky wink to Fellini’s La Strada (1954); the overall fantastic sound design and even the use of doors as symbolic entry points into Sarah and David’s personal histories. His strength with aesthetic elements also extends to how he uses magical realism. Instead of being coy with it, his characters address it with healthy skepticism and even gentle mockery as it guides them on their road trip of discovery. Most importantly, it’s a conduit for them to be emotionally vulnerable with one another as they revisit these spaces, places and moments that allow them piece together why they’re such failures at allowing themselves to love.

Kogonada reunites with Farrell, his collaborator in After Yang (2021), and again elicits a beautifully nuanced performance from him. As an Irish old soul, David is the warmer of the two who clearly yearns to connect and find love with a true partner. On the other hand, Robbie is equal parts luminous and prickly as Sarah. Her walls are fortified, which frames her in a less generous light than David. And that inequity in their overall goals only gets more pronounced in the last act when they break away from one another for independent reflection on specific moments that stunted their future, emotional growth. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but David’s experience really doesn’t make any sense in its execution or outcome. And Sarah’s epiphany is divorced from what the narrative already established to be the source of her chronic commitment issues, so her resolution feels shoehorned and inauthentic.

Perhaps that’s because Reiss is so mercurial in conveying Sarah’s consistent wants and needs throughout. There’s a disconnect that remains between Sarah and David that neither the script, Kogonada or the talents of Robbie and Farrell overcome in the end. As such, there’s a rushed nature to the ending that cheats us, and the actors, of any emotional catharsis. Then Kogonada leans on a terrible, on-the-nose needle drop to fill in that emotional void, leaving us with a shallow and very flat conclusion. What a shame that is, because a good portion of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has some worthwhile, truthful things to say about how the past informs (or clouds) our present, the delights found in the stirrings of new love, and the damage that comes with being unforgiving of ourselves. Robbie and Farrell deserved a better outcome for their fine work.

Director: Kogonada
Writer: Seth Reiss
Stars: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell
Release Date: September 19, 2025

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett, Bluesky @tarabennett.bsky.social, or Instagram @TaraDBen.

 
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