Open your heart to Kogonada’s ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’

This magical realism continues to underscore his meet-cute with the bride and groom’s friend Sarah (Margot Robbie), an opinionated, free-spirited, intimidatingly beautiful manic pixie dream girl, who speaks in cliches about rejecting romance. Their interactions feel straight out of a freshman writing exercise, and yet, there’s something alluring about their chemistry. Farrell and Robbie seem to play this meeting as though it was fated, and as if, on some level, the two have known each other all their lives.

There’s no sci-fi or fantasy twist to explain their mysterious dynamic. On their drive out, circumstances push them further together, and before they know it, they’re negotiating the terms of their initial courtship, and how much they want to be involved. They’re an attractive pair of movie stars, which, for a century and change, has usually been enough. When Sarah’s car breaks down, and David’s GPS tells him to give her a ride, they begin making frequent stops at doors in the middle of nowhere, which transport them to moments from their lives—usually their childhood—which they proceed to watch each other re-enact as adults, revisiting painful or embarrassing memories. They readily accept this premise, so it’s easy enough for us to go along for the ride.

From left, Margot Robbie as Sarah and Colin Farrell as David in "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey."

Sony Pictures Entertainment

The movie’s early scenes are rendered with muted versions of the bright hues seen in classic Hollywood musicals. Umbrellas, golden raindrops, and wide open fields play host to the couple’s transient moments, but the film never bursts out into song (save for one flashback set during David’s high school performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying). It is, in essence, a grandiose Hollywood romance robbed of its grandeur, in order to focus on the emotional nitty gritties that might have been left on the cutting room floor of classics like Casablanca or Singin’ in the Rain. As the characters walk through each living flashback, they’re confronted with questions of how they’ve treated past romantic partners, and of how they see their parents, as though the process of meeting one another had opened up old wounds. It's a mirror to how getting to know someone becomes a means to better know yourself, but the form it takes threatens to tip over into an uncanny valley at all times.

On one hand, an additional draft might have smoothed over some of its bumpy dialogue. But on the other hand, its cliches are entirely the point. In 2025, our lives are inseparable from the media that molds our understanding of human experiences from an early age. Most of us watch romantic films before we’re old enough to truly love. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey turns that understanding on its head, playing out like a death dream in the mind of someone whose most meaningful lifelong moments were inseparable from cinematic aphorisms. It’s absurdist theater blown up for the big screen, with interludes of its actors rehearsing conversations under spotlights before empty seats. As we enter adolescence, our ideas of adult love are shaped by the movies, and each crush and steady partner becomes a practice run of sorts, for when we’re ready for our close up.

Director Kogonada and Colin Farrell behind the scenes of "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey."

Sony Pictures Entertainment

As platitude-laden as the film might be, Kogonada also knows exactly how and when to wield silence, even during phantasmagorical moments of David and Sarah sitting down with people from their past. If you zoom out and take account in literal terms, A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is the love story of two people who barely know each other by the time the credits roll. But step a little closer, and its dialed-in performances elevate each banality and create ecstatic meta-textual layers about the reductive process of romanticizing people and relationships. It lays the blame at the feet of cinema for creating a language of love, while subsequently speaking that very language to write poems about the thrill of possibility, and the inevitable heartbreak of having to see the worst parts of yourself through someone else’s eyes.