The Map That Leads to You review – sugary Amazon romance works best as travelogue

The Guardian

3 hours ago

A book-loving American woman in her 20s decides to spend time in Europe before she settles into the safety of a finance job in New York City, but she ends up falling for a man who is harbouring a tragic secret about his future. She's played by an in-house Netflix star, he's played by a non-American actor known for his role in a hit TV show. The film is based on a novel and is premiering on a streaming platform this month. While this might not be dramatically similar enough to become a Dante's Peak/Volcano situation, it's hard not to watch Amazon's The Map That Leads to You, out this week, and frequently think about Netflix's loosely similar My Oxford Year, released at the start of August.
What immediately separates the two, and often separates Netflix and Amazon movies in general, is the aesthetic. My Oxford Year is every bit a TV movie while The Map That Leads to You is as glossy and sweeping as one deserving of a big screen release. That's both the Jeff Bezos budget bump but also the benefit of having a director like Lasse Hallström at the helm. The Oscar-nominated Swedish film-maker was once Hollywood's master of the middlebrow movie, behind Sunday afternoon specials like Chocolat and The Cider House Rules. But it's his later Nicholas Sparks adaptations Dear John and Safe Haven that made him the ideal choice here, smoothly guiding an adaptation of JP Monninger's sappy 2017 novel The Map That Leads to You (the book is even adorned by a Sparks quote).
Trusty hands help in making the film feel grander especially when the emotion of the story, adapted by Dante's Peak's Les Bohem and Don't Make Me Go's Vera Herbert, can't quite get us there.
We meet Heather (Madelyn Cline) and her two friends as they near the final stretch of their Eurotrip, perfectly bullet pointed to the final detail. Heather is a type A over-thinker, whose Notes app schedule for her post-graduation and pre-first job in the city hurrah did not include having a meet-cute with Jack (Riverdale's KJ Apa), a handsome New Zealander and fellow Ernest Hemingway fan. He's everything she isn't – impulsive and unplanned – and she finds herself changing her plan, and herself, as the pair start to fall in love.
Apa is a likable enough actor but he struggles to sell a lot of Jack's manic pixie dream boy shtick, blandly insisting on the power of living in the moment and saying things like: 'I really believe that your thoughts help create your future,' with a straight face. The film's reheated messaging about the importance of following heart over head is ultimately a sneaky way to push the female lead off her course and on to his, as she relinquishes control to let him lead the way. Their jaunt around Europe, now on his terms, is a simple, seductive watch less for their burgeoning relationship, although they have decently sparky chemistry, and more for the crisply captured scenery, a lush and transporting late summer trip for us stuck at home, from Spain to Portugal to Italy and so on. Hallström knows exactly how to make his films look and feel delectable and at a time of ongoing streamer tinniness, it's a pleasure to be led by someone who truly knows where he's going.
It's just a shame that we're being led somewhere so familiar. Not just because My Oxford Year recently took us there too (the 'reveal' is almost identical) but because so many romantic dramas have taken us there before. Both films try to avoid the standard cliches that come with the territory but neither manages anything truly new or, more importantly, poignant enough to bring the tears that should be cascading by the finale. Cline, as she recently showed in the I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel, is an incredibly engaging young star but one hopes her career leads her somewhere more unconventional next.
The Map That Leads to You is available on Amazon Prime Video on 20 August