Film Review: The Travellers (2025) - Australia
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave... The oldest stories resonate the deepest. Australian Director Bruce Beresford, returning to the intimate Australian terrain that birthed films like "Breaker Morant" and "Don's Party," understands this profoundly. "The Travellers," released late last year, isn't about reinventing the prodigal son's return. It's about dissecting that familiar ache with a scalpel sharpened by sun, dust, and the unbearable weight of unsaid things. This is a film where home isn't a sanctuary, but a museum of unresolved tensions under a punishing Western Australian sky.
Stephen Seary (Luke Bracey, shedding action-hero skin with remarkable grace) jets in from the rarefied air of European opera houses. His mission is grim: a final audience with his dying mother. But the true confrontation awaits him in the form of his father, Fred. Bryan Brown, in a performance that feels less like acting and more like the earth itself cracking open, embodies Fred. He’s a monument of Australian stoicism, weathered and immovable. He views Stephen’s cosmopolitan success not with pride, but with a bewildered resentment. What use are velvet curtains and standing ovations against the solid, stubborn reality of the land he knows?
Beresford, thankfully, avoids grand pronouncements. His direction is deceptively simple, almost invisible. He lets the landscape, captured with a stark, beautiful harshness by Peter James, do the heavy lifting. The sterile, transient world Stephen inhabits clashes violently with the sun-bleached, static reality of his hometown. It’s not just scenery; it’s the physical manifestation of the chasm between father and son. You feel the heat, the dust in your throat, the sheer distance – geographical and emotional – that Stephen has traveled, only to find he never really escaped.
What elevates "The Travellers" beyond its well-trodden path is its brutal honesty. Bracey is excellent, conveying Stephen’s jet-lagged soul and the perpetual anxiety of a man living out of suitcases, perpetually displaced. But this is Brown’s film. He makes Fred difficult, often infuriatingly obstinate, yet undeniably, heartbreakingly human. There’s no cheap sentimentality, no Hollywood epiphany waiting in the wings. Brown grounds every moment in a gruff, earthy realism. You see the love, buried deep beneath layers of pride and incomprehension, only flickering to the surface when the clock is ticking down. It’s a masterclass in conveying volumes with a grunt, averted eyes, or the way he holds a worn-out hat.
Yes, the pacing is deliberate. Some may call it slow. But this isn't laziness; it's the necessary rhythm of lives lived in quiet desperation, of words that take decades to form. Beresford forces us to sit in the uncomfortable silences, to feel the weight of decades of misunderstanding hanging heavy in the air-conditioned living room. The film earns its emotional payoff precisely because it refuses to offer an easy one.
“The Travellers" is a quiet, resonant triumph. It’s a film about the inescapable baggage of blood and place. It understands that you can change your address, your continent, your entire world, but the gravitational pull of family – its wounds and its weary, unspoken loyalty – remains constant. For those who seek drama anchored not in spectacle, but in the profound depths of human connection and disconnection, delivered by actors operating at the peak of their powers, "The Travellers" is essential viewing. It’s one of the finest, most truthful Australian films in recent memory, a poignant reminder that sometimes, the hardest journey isn't the one across oceans, but the one across the living room. (Neo, 2026)