“You sound cool talking out your ass,” Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) quips to his best friend and roommate, Simon (newcomer Tristan Turner), a struggling filmmaker. In Alex Mallis and Travis Wood’s debut feature, The Travel Companion, Simon spends an admirably, cringe-inducingly large amount of his time explaining, to anyone who will listen or tolerate it, the vague contours of his next film project, an experimental, hybrid docu-fiction-travelogue about the cultural bridges and walls between people around the world. Bruce’s assessment is only half-correct, though — floundering for increasingly lofty, but ultimately empty, descriptors for a film he has no idea how to make, Simon in no way sounds cool.
The only reason Simon is even able to attempt this globe-trotting film project is because Bruce works for an airline and has chosen Simon as his official travel companion, allowing him free standby flights to anywhere in the world for a year. Simon inadvertently complicates the arrangement when he introduces Bruce to filmmaker Beatrice after a screening of their short films, and they immediately hit it off. Their courtship is breezy and pleasant, and Simon is along for the ride, but when things between Bruce and Beatrice get more serious, she suddenly becomes a wedge, not only between Simon and Bruce’s long-standing friendship, but between Simon’s borderline-delusional self-image as a filmmaker and the disappointing reality, and his cushy arrangement as Bruce’s travel companion.
Simon and Bruce’s friendship anchors The Travel Companion thanks to Turner and Oberbeck’s razor-sharp chemistry, which consistently buoys a film whose comedy of cringey social ineptitude and straight-guy lovability eventually gives way to heavier conflict. Oberbeck is no stranger as a leading man in micro-budget indies such as this. Two years ago he starred in Tynan DeLong’s improvised, cringe-comedy Dad and Step-Dad, alongside Colin Burgess, whose own performance in Ryan Brown’s breakout comedy, Free Time, two years ago, finds kinship in the oblivious obstinance of Turner’s.
The look and feel of The Travel Companion establishes the inherent paradoxes of artistic pursuit. One day you might find yourself helping a stranger take a cool picture for a contest, basking in the the dual glows of New York City and the joy of collaboration; and another day you’re wandering under the harsh fluorescence of LaGuardia Airport, staring out the window at yet another plane that will take you to a new country to work on a project you don’t even know how to make, or to show a film you don’t care about. Jason Chiu’s cinematography feels lush and expensive, in spite of this film’s microbudget bona fides. The preponderance of stolen shots, particularly at airports, call attention to themselves mostly for how seamlessly they fit into the film’s overall aesthetic; they’re as much a part of microbudget filmmaking as the hell of fitting creative pursuits into a schedule dominated by soul-crushing day jobs and secretly stewing over the commercial success of your peers.
It’s no surprise, then, that Mallis and Wood have a strong grasp on New York film culture. The opening scene of the film is an extended Q&A session at one of the many festivals where Simon presents his thesis. There, the programmer proclaims the importance of all the short documentaries the audience just watched, and asks them gag-inducingly pretentious questions. To the directors’ credit, they don’t let the filmmakers in this scene off the hook either, recruiting familiar faces like Joanna Arnow and Brit Fryer to poke fun at their own professions with equally lofty and empty answers. Of course, the irony of this scene is that these answers take so long that Simon, perhaps the filmmaker who has the most he’d like to say, never gets a chance to speak.
If there’s one disappointment in The Travel Companion it’s that its recognizable narrative trajectory casts a pall of inevitability over most of the runtime. The characters are extremely vivid and textured, though the dynamics between them are a little too legible. Still, Mallis and Wood execute the film’s ending cleanly and without too much reliance on sentimentality. One gets the impression through its redemptive conclusion that they wanted to honor the sense of relief that comes with a successful film premiere. Should The Travel Companion find an audience, it’s hard to imagine it not also being a success.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 1.
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