(The Tribeca Festival runs June 4-15 in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood and Hammer to Nail has boots on the ground! Check out M.J. O’Toole’s The Travel Companion movie review fresh from the fest. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
It’s not easy living and working as an independent filmmaker in today’s world. Directing duo Travis Wood and Alex Mallis capture the pain, tediousness, and shame that come with trying to get any kind of project off the ground in their unflinching feature debut, The Travel Companion. This meticulous comedy (which the duo co-wrote with Weston Auburn) takes a long, hard look at the New York indie film scene of today, and how one’s creative crisis can spiral into ego and desperation without making it far-fetched like most recent dark comedies would. This is what unfolds for Simon (Tristan Turner), a young filmmaker with a needy side struggling to take his in-progress feature in a certain direction. But one question that this film raises is how far one’s own insecurities and self-doubt impact even your closest relationships. Simon is the kind of character you may come across in a Noah Baumbach picture, an artist of sorts whose self-absorption leads him to a rude awakening. But if you’re a struggling artist in today’s world, his journey is more relatable than you might like to admit. Wood and Mallis apply a sense of realism not only to the indie filmmaking scene, but also to New York itself as well as the idealists and optimists who inhabit it.
We first meet Simon as part of a group of filmmakers invited to speak at a post-screening Q&A for their shorts block (featuring indie icon Joanna Arnow in a cameo) whose opportunity to speak gets cut off as the theater needs to be cleared out for the next show – a gut punch to anyone who works hard on a project and is eager to say their piece about it. But, the scene establishes the kind of humor we are in for. One person who listens to Simon and gives him a good bit of validation is his childhood best friend and roommate, Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck). Bruce, an airline employee, has the benefit of choosing one person as his “travel companion” every year to travel around the world for free on standby flights. That person is Simon, who uses this perk to travel wherever to shoot footage for his experimental documentary, which he says is about “past and future… what unites us and what divides us,” etc., so forth. He never hesitates every ten minutes or so to ask Bruce to book a flight for him, which he doesn’t mind doing since there’s no one else to use these privileges.
Their convenient dynamic soon changes when Bruce begins dating Beatrice (Naomi Asa), another filmmaker who was in the same shorts block with Simon. The pair, being two of the nicest people you would meet, seems like a good match for one another, but the minute Simon sees them together, he starts feeling threatened by their courtship. The thought of Beatrice taking his free flight privileges drives him crazy to the point of obsession, even though Bruce and Beatrice couldn’t care less about it. Maybe Simon wouldn’t be feeling this way if Bruce were dating somebody other than Beatrice. After all, she does seem to be on a more assured, established path in her filmmaking career. She has a steady commercial directing gig while seeking funding for her first feature. Simon, on the other hand, works a dead-end videography job for NYC Cabs while his feature doc has been “marinating” over the past few years. Even when he talks about his work, it sounds more like a concept rather than a project with a steadier plan. Thus, Simon feeling threatened by Beatrice likely comes from a place of envy. Even when Bruce becomes more private about his personal life, Simon keeps pestering him about keeping his free flights to the point where he starts meddling in his and Beatrice’s relationship, marking the beginning of their friendship deteriorating. Bruce can only take so much of Simon’s wet blanket tendencies, and you can tell that towards the end, he will give his insecure friend a much-needed wake-up call.
This seems to be the year where the darkest corners of male friendship are explored in cringy tones, much similar to the recent dark comedy Friendship and the upcoming stalker thriller Lurker. But while those films are set in a more heightened reality, Travis Wood and Alex Mallis explore the friendship at the center through a much more authentic, grounded, and painfully relatable lens. Visually, the film employs a mix of swarming cityscapes and airport scenes (captured by DP Jason Chiu) to reflect Simon’s internal conflict, shifting between movement and inaction. The Travel Companion might be one of the most accurate depictions of the broader anxieties and diffidence that artists face nowadays. Relative newcomer Tristan Turner is a revelation, giving a fleshed-out performance as someone going through self-doubt who mostly needs someone to listen to him, even though he’s a giant pain in the ass. It wouldn’t be surprising if Wood and Mallis had to endure their own creative roadblocks leading up to this film, and it has certainly paid off in this introspective comedy that raises more questions about what artists must endure rather than offer easier alternatives. Just like the brilliant final shot, the time has come for people to hear their voice.
– M.J. O’Toole (@mj_otoole93)
2025 Tribeca Fest; Travis Wood and Alex Mallis; The Travel Companion
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