The Travellers Movie Review (2025)

A speculative drama examining how different choices might reshape the course of a life, The Travellers has an intriguing premise, but it never goes anywhere that you might care about.

This last month has included a lot of travel for me. Between a family wedding, a trip with my daughter, and then moving her to college, I’ve been on a lot of planes recently. And when I’m on a flight, I like to choose movies that I’ve never heard of or might have never watched. That’s exactly what happened here.

The Travellers is about Stephen, a successful stage designer who has returned to Australia to see his dying mother. While there, he must confront the realities of his father’s life and his sister’s expectations as he reconnects with past loves and learns about their lives now.

This is a very subdued, slow-moving film that attempts to address the question, “What if you made different life choices?” The problem is that it is all so understated that you really don’t care.

I kept waiting to find some way to invest in this film, but every relationship is underdeveloped. The characters are fine, you just don’t know much about them. For example, you learn that the protagonist is a scene designer, you see some of his sketches, and he seems passionate about the opera he is designing. If they’d given three more minutes to a deeper look at any of these things, I might have cared more, but they didn’t, and I didn’t.

There is a passing mention of a character who believes he’s related to Jesus. That struck me as interesting, but there were no more than 30 seconds dedicated to that discussion. Why was it brought up? Why is this rated R? Why did I stop myself from fast-forwarding through some of the scenes?

I got the feeling that The Travellers wanted to be a philosophical movie about something or other, but it was really just dull. It actually made my airplane flight feel longer. Don’t watch it. There are far better films out there.

Runtime: 97 minutes

Motion Picture Rating: R

Languages Spoken In The Film: English and German with English subtitles

Should You Watch It? No

Did I Cry? Nope

My Rating: 1.5/5 Stars

Available: Free on Netflix, to rent on Prime Video, or may be available for free on other streaming platforms