Why would a blind man want to travel through Scotland? “There is more than one way to feel your surroundings,” is roughly the answer, and it doubles as the film’s thesis — a gentle, generous argument for the idea that perception is not a function of sight but of attention, and that the right companion can teach you to attend to the world more carefully than you ever managed alone.
Marc Turtletaub’s film, adapted from Jay Parini’s memoir of an encounter he describes as having altered the course of his life, is set in 1971. Parini — played by Fionn Whitehead as a young man coiled somewhere between ambition and self-doubt — is a doctoral student at St Andrews, in Scotland partly to study, partly to avoid the Vietnam draft, and mostly to figure out what kind of writer he is going to be. His mentor Alastair Reid (Alan Cumming, reliably excellent) asks him to look after a visiting Latin American poet while he’s away. The poet turns out to be Jorge Luis Borges — then in his seventies, almost entirely blind, and one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century, of whom Parini has never heard. Borges, played by the Chilean actor Luis Gnecco in a performance that is already generating significant awards conversation, has one request: he wants to see Scotland.
What follows is disarmingly funny before it becomes something more quietly profound. Borges tips a rowing boat on Loch Ness, gets lost in a castle maze, and discoursed at length on mythology, metaphysics and Anglo-Saxon riddles while Parini navigates narrow Highland roads in a car that is barely holding together. The comedy is warm rather than broad — Gnecco’s Borges is eccentric and imperious and unexpectedly tender, a man of ferocious intellect who is also, quite clearly, lonely. Whitehead handles the difficult task of playing a young man who doesn’t yet know who he is against someone who is entirely, immovably themselves, and the dynamic between them has a natural, unforced quality that gives the film its emotional core.
The Scottish Highlands, meanwhile, are photographed with the kind of beauty that stops feeling like a cliché because the film actually earns it. This isn’t landscape as backdrop. The moors and lochs and grey skies carry genuine thematic weight in a film about a blind man who experiences a country he cannot see, described by a young man who is slowly learning how to look.
It is not a perfect film. The middle section sags somewhat when a romance between Parini and a local woman draws focus away from Borges, and some of the more overtly philosophical exchanges risk tipping from illuminating into instructive. But these are minor complaints against something that is, fundamentally, a generous and beautifully made piece of cinema — the kind of road movie that is really about arrival rather than destination, and about what you become in the company of someone who sees the world entirely differently to you.
Borges, in his writing, was obsessed with labyrinths — structures that appear to lead somewhere but fold back on themselves, trapping the traveller in patterns they can’t quite see from inside. Turtletaub’s film heartwarmingly suggests that the right person, encountered at the right moment, can be the thread that leads you out.
