The Travel Companion had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 5 June 2025
Travis Wood and Alex Mallis’ feature debut The Travel Companion opens – and indeed closes – with that most familiar of film festival events, a post-screening Q&A. After a programme of documentary shorts has been presented in a small theatre, the filmmakers shuffle up for an all-too-brief on-stage appearance – so brief, indeed, that there is no time for Simon (Tristan Turner), at the end of the line, to get so much as a word in.
The sequence mercilessly skewers the pomposity and pretentiousness that often surround such events, and will no doubt make for some awkwardly self-conscious sessions when The Travel Companion itself does the festival rounds – and yet the suggestion made by the MCing programmer (David Smilow) that the shorts all instantiate “a particular discourse going on right now across many different disciplines about the ways in which people, I mean real human people, are essentially in conflict with their futures, their environments, and with each other” also serves as a programmatic introduction to what Wood and Mallis are themselves doing here.
For while Simon has been living off his past and “milking” for all it is worth the dissertation project he made years ago just so that he can remain on the margins of the scene, he seems unable to commit to the future or to finish his latest short, and has instead been lollygagging through life without any sign of progress. He has a day job that he despises shooting and editing promotional material for a taxi company (the mobility that it represents contrasting with his own torpor), and he spends some of his spare time filming endless new material for a project that he seems to have conceptualised only in the very vaguest of terms. He is already bored by all the footage that he has come up with so far.
The one good thing going in Simon’s life is his house mate and best friend Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) – and more importantly the status that Bruce, who works long hours in airport administration, has conferred upon Simon as his designated ‘travel companion’, meaning that Simon can get free flights (on standby) to wherever he likes. This enables Simon at leisure to visit film festivals and shoot footage for his project all around the world, just so long as he is disciplined enough – which often he is not – to get to the airport in time for the available flights.
It is a privilege and a perquisite (though not his own) which Simon has come to take for granted – but when Bruce starts dating Beatrice (Naomi Asa), who was presenting her own proof-of-concept short alongside Simon at the screening in the opening sequence, Simon suspects that he is being displaced, even outclassed, in Bruce’s eyes and esteem, by a fellow filmmaker far more talented and harder working than Simon himself. So, in a pique of straightforward jealousy and more abstract existential terror, Simon fixates on his travel companion status as a line in the sand that he will not cede to his perceived rival – and in pursuing this end, Simon undermines himself and everything on which he has come to depend.
A character study packaged as comedy of cringe, The Travel Companion is painfully probing and persistent in its observation of human foibles – chiefly Simon’s laziness and jaw-dropping selfishness. Again and again, Simon will prove his own worst enemy, endlessly talking bullshit that nobody, not even he himself, is buying, repeatedly asserting entitlement over things (his travelling status, his filmmaking talent) that are not natural rights and that require more effort on his part than he is ever willing to put in, and driving away even his closest friends with his repellent, relentless narcissism. At the same time, there are aspects of Simon to which we can all – uncomfortably – relate.
When Beatrice tells Bruce that she is interested in writing autofiction, “because you can, like, inhabit the memory, but also you have the safety of fiction to frame it”, she is expressly raising the question, in this most meta of movies about the moviemaking process, as to how much of what we are seeing might be semi-autobiographical, based on the experiences of Wood and Mallis (and possibly also their co-writer Weston Auburn) as they went through the process of realising their own first feature. Is Simon in part who they are, or at least were? Or might there, if we are being honest about ourselves, be a little bit of Simon in every single one of us? Who after all is not at times snobbish and self-mythologising, parasitic and posturing, leeching and lost?
One of the ironies in The Travel Companion is that despite its title, and despite the status to which Simon so desperately clings, the only travel that we ever see in the film is its protagonist’s trips to and from the airport, increasingly in vain. Simon is not just rooted in New York, but stuck there – at least until the end – in a film which at times resembles a seasonal city symphony. For all his love of adventure and his piggybacking on Bruce’s hard work, Simon is, both metaphorically and ever more literally, going nowhere – and it takes his personal meltdown, and his demolition of all that he holds dear, to get him finally moving and finishing what he has started.
It is not clear in the end though if he has truly found himself and learnt something valuable from this experience, or if he is just right back where he began. Either way, this is a very funny, if squirm-inducingly confronting, portrait of a deeply flawed man, and of all the faults and failings that go into making a film just like this one.
strap: Travis Wood and Alex Mallis’ implicitly autofictive feature debut makes unflinching, cringy comedy of a New York filmmaker’s unearned sense of entitlement
© Anton Bitel
