A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Review: Kogonada Crafts a Lovely Adventure with Trademark Empathy

If there’s a thread running through Kogonada’s films to date, it’s his distinct fascination with spare, deeply human character studies unfolding within meticulously designed worlds. As a sweeping, romantic fantasy, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is less grounded than the quiet modernist backdrops of Columbus or the pragmatic futurism of After Yang, but its blueprint is not wholly dissimilar. By design, the film is divorced from reality; a polished facsimile of a familiar world, leaning into a kind of Pinterest board chic to contrast with the plight of its characters’ sobering self-discovery.

Based on a Black List script by The Menu scribe Seth Reiss, Journey follows Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as David and Sarah, two seemingly content singles that meet at a wedding––that is, after they’re separately forced to rent transportation from a mysterious Car Rental Agency that has equipped them with omniscient GPS for their respective travels. In spite of a high concept, the film’s mechanics are incredibly simple: the two miss their connection at the wedding, and are instead rerouted to a rest stop the next day. They are then unwittingly brought together after they accept the titular journey that the GPS presents. They enter mysterious doors into their respective pasts, unpacking formative moments and confronting harder truths. All of this is digested with a matter-of-fact attitude, mercifully bereft of exposition and clunky world-building. The Hows and Whys are unclear but irrelevant, and the amenable nature of our protagonists to their fantastic predicament is adopted by the film as a whole: go with it, be open, and maybe this will make you feel something lovely if you let it.

This is specifically where Kogonada’s knack for structure comes in. He crafts the film as a sort of trust exercise. We’re introduced to David and Sarah as prototypical romantic archetypes pulled from a mid-aughts indie playbook. Farrell is some version of a fragile, lonely boy; Robbie is not quite a manic pixie dream girl, but might be her cousin. Their initial meet-cute at a generic Instagram wedding is stilted, especially considering the pair’s otherwise innate charisma. It’s a scene that warrants head-scratching and perhaps an eye-roll or two, especially for a more cynical viewer. But as things unfold, and Kogonada plays his hand, David and Sarah’s initially stiff, forced encounters give way to more revealing acknowledgements, and you can feel the film relax. Getting to know one another as they sift through their memories, they betray certain airs they’ve been presenting and dispatch rehearsed versions of their personas they’ve been comfortably performing for too long. These are two gorgeous people occupying a “Clarendon” filtered reality who still have a ton of work to do on themselves.

There’s a threat of some darker, too-serious melodrama, but it’s swiftly avoided thanks to the undercurrent of practicality about the whole thing. It’s only when David fully surrenders to unabashed emotionality that things go awry for him. This plays out wonderfully in a high school musical sequence bolstered by Farrell’s full commitment to the bit. As more doors and memories unlock, so too does the film, and a kind of magic trick occurs: a manufactured romance about thawing cynicism, deliberately plastic in its construction, stealthily warms you up with its oscillation of fantasy and honesty. That’s not to say the juggle is a completely steady one. Kogonada’s earnestness is refreshing, but occasionally undercut. A few unironic needle drops (again pulling from a mid-aughts playbook) are at odds with the legendary Joe Hisaishi’s lovely score, possibly betraying studio notes that don’t know what to make of the film’s calculus. That calculus circumvents any truly dire ghosts to haunt David and Sarah, and could be seen as a bit of a shrug. But, here for a nice time not a long time, it’s a willing sacrifice in favor of something lighter on its feet. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is sweet but not saccharine; cute but not twee. It’s quite content in using its fabricated, non-specific reality to examine the nuances of its leads, such as they are. Kogonada delightfully exploits the simple joy of beautiful people falling in love on screen. He deploys his trademark empathy as a means of encouragement: Go with it, be open, and maybe this will make you feel something lovely if you let it.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey opens in theaters on Friday, September 19.