The Map That Leads to You is Amazon Prime's latest original.
The film neither makes you swoon nor sweat with any sultriness.
The dialogue of the characters lands flat and they embody empty husks of human beings.
The Map That Leads to You is a love story with the personality of a turnip. There is a reason Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) has lived in our collective imagination for nearly three decades—it took two strangers, a European backdrop, and an evening of conversation, and made it feel like the most vital love story. Many lesser films have tried to replicate that magic with no success. The Map That Leads to You, Lasse Hallström’s adaptation of J.P. Monninger’s 2017 novel, is the latest addition to that list.
The film follows Heather Mulgrew (Madelyn Cline), a pragmatic American travelling through Europe with her two best friends. And then there’s Jack (KJ Apa), her foil—a free-spirited traveller lugging his great grandfather’s journal through the continent, following in his old man’s footsteps.
A few minutes in and one can’t help but marvel at the sheer white privilege oozing from Jack and Heather’s little escapades, as they saunter through Europe doing things that would get a brown person deported faster than they can say “Schengen.”
Jack and Heather’s so-called “meet-cute” happens on a train to Barcelona, when Jack decides to take a nap on the luggage rack above Heather’s seat. Everyone in the film smirks at the cutesy spontaneity. I was waiting for the ticket inspector to drag him down and fine him into oblivion.
Their first kiss occurs in a cable car at night, after the whole building has shut down. That’s breaking and entering! But they get away and later rob a man (who had stolen Amy’s passport) to fund the rest of their vacation. Call me an old, anxious mess, but watching privileged Americans bend rules, break laws, and still be rewarded with golden sunsets and lingering violins has never looked this gormless and off-putting.
The Map That Leads to You isn’t even fun in a cheesy, corny, guilty-pleasure way. It neither makes you swoon nor sweat with any sultriness. Cline and Apa have about as much chemistry as two plastic spoons. Their dialogue lands flat and they embody empty husks of human beings for most of the narrative.
What unfolds over the film’s roughly 90-minute runtime is a crash course in ‘how to make a Euro-road trip movie bland and uninspiring 101.’ The film takes us from Amsterdam to Barcelona to Porto and so much more. That should automatically radiate romance and wanderlust. But if you want to watch sunlit canals, Spanish plazas, and coastal cliffs in 4K splendour, you have YouTube for that. These backdrops in The Map That Leads to You exist like stock footage in a travel agency slideshow.
The big emotional reveal—that Jack is terminally ill—comes with the same amount of pathos as you might get from watching a boiling potato turn over. A pivotal confrontation between the two leads also plays out with less fire than an airport food court argument. There is just no redemption here.
Even the side characters—Connie (Sofia Wylie) and Amy (Madison Thompson)—exist only to provide filler banter before disappearing back into irrelevance. No subplot develops, no friendships are fleshed out, and certainly no counterbalance emerges to save the central romance from its mind-numbing blandness.
It is not entirely the actors’ fault when no one else seems to have tried here. The screenplay (co-written by Les Bohem and Vera Herbert) does them no favours, saddling them with dialogue that alternates between Hallmark-card clichés and faux-philosophical mumbling regurgitated by some generative AI somewhere.
Hallström, the veteran director of Chocolat (2000) and What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), once had a reputation for elevating maudlin sentiment with grace and heart. I’m all here for creatives bankrolling their lives by squeezing every last dime out of the capitalist overlords—more power to them. I just wish it came with some warning. I guess this review could be that for you.
Those daydreaming of a “Euro summer,” scrolling Pinterest boards of Porto sunsets and Paris cafés can tune into better films. A rewatch of Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha (2015) could satisfy your inner travel bug better and can even spark hefty philosophical contemplations. I ended up with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), which is sexier in its first 40 minutes than The Map That Leads to You is in its entire runtime. But you do you.
Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power
