I’ve always had trouble with the fantasy genre, though there are many cases when the form works wonderfully. Great examples include The Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast (the 1946 Jean Cocteau version), It’s a Wonderful Life, A Matter of Life and Death, Orpheus, Ugetsu, The Seventh Seal, Groundhog Day, and Being John Malkovich. But it’s a risky genre, so often sinking into leaden whimsy and artifice that it never gets any liftoff into the uncanny or the magical. And there you are, stranded among images of talking animals in hats and flying cars and actors exuding fake awe or some other such hellish scenario.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey tells you, just by its try-hard title alone, that it’s going to be one of those cringe-inducing fantasy romances. Its release has been postponed several times, never a reassuring sign, and even the trailer conveyed a high ick factor. The film stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as wary singles David and Sarah who go separately to the same oddly run used car rental place, the Car Rental Agency, in order to take a road trip to a wedding.

There, two eccentric clerks, played by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, urge them to purchase the GPS option on the ancient Saturns they’re renting. The GPS functions as a godly guide to what becomes the forced fantastical journey they go on together. They encounter a series of magic doors along the way that lead them to interludes from their pasts, repeat experiences that might allow them to unload their emotional baggage and forge a future together.