Grand Tour ★★★★

Released: Friday 18th April 2025

Directed: Miguel Gomes

Cast: Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khě Tran

Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour is a film that is easy to lavish with kind descriptive words. Beguiling, mesmerising, playful, bizarre, beautiful—all slip off the tongue effortlessly when describing it. Whilst accurate, these words don’t paint the full picture of wonder that is Gomes’ latest. It is the sort of film that needs to be seen to be believed, to be experienced in all its cinematic glory as opposed to merely watched. Moreover, Grand Tour is so freewheeling in structure, cinematic language, and form, that it really is impossible to bracket it to one word or description. Homages to film history are frequent here, but still the film feels unshakably refreshing.

Grand Tour begins with a delicate shot of a human-powered ferris wheel in Myanmar. It is present day, but an unspecified narrator’s voiceover introduces one of the film’s leads, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), as he arrives at Mandalay train station in 1918. This effortless splicing and intersecting of time periods is consistent by Gomes, adding to the film’s bewildering and hypnotic nature. More specifically, via this constant technique, history—from fact to fiction and everything else in between—becomes baked into each environment. Grand Tour at its heart, is a time capsule that feels unearthed from the depths of our world, constructed from numerous histories and cultures.

Edward’s arrival in Rangoon (now called Yangon), Myanmar’s largest city, comes after he abandons his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), on their wedding day. Across Myanmar and then other East Asian countries, Molly follows him in what becomes a bizarre and occasionally aimless anti-romance story. Each country Edward enters gives him new experiences; fresh cultures sparkle at his inquisitive mind, but Gomes never romanticises the heavy colonialist aspects of Grand Tour. Instead, he complexly criticises how cultures that were new to, in this case, the Portuguese went misunderstood and misused, whilst also drawing parallels between colonialism in the past carrying over into our present. In each country, Edward is an outsider. Subtitles are given only for dialogue in Portuguese, or anything else that he understands (although voice overs are all subtitled).

Grand Tour isn’t perfect: its two hour plus runtime can be testing when the story is notably lacking. Essentially split into two one-hour segments following Edward and then Molly, there isn’t a great deal to latch onto narratively or character-wise, but this matters less when the languid pacing is this hypnotic. When Edward’s journey reaches Thailand, for example, Grand Tour engulfs you even more, with the audio of the environment (both urban and rural) reaching out to grab you. It starts to feel like an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, so it’s no surprise to see Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s name (Weerasethakul’s frequent collaborator) pop up in the credits as one of three cinematographers, along with Rui Poças and Gui Liang.

When Gomes takes us to Japan, it feels like we’re in a classic Kenji Mizoguchi film; so often you can see the different influences that Gomes is drawing upon and then feeding into his film, from filmic and cultural sources. Everything about Grand Tour is so rich in detail, from the exquisite black-and-white photography to the delicate but complex script. This is a globetrotting, fantastical travelogue that somehow never buckles under its thematic weight or vast number of settings. Everywhere we go with Edward and Molly has countless stories to tell; we are lucky enough to get just a few snippets.