The North

What makes a relationship work, the filmmaker Desiree Akhavan once told me, is finding somebody you can fall in love with over and over again.

It doesn’t really matter what kind of relationship or what kind of love that is.

We first encounter Chris (Bart Harder) and Lluis (Carles Pulido) in voice only, as the camera rests on a view of mountains guarded by dark pines, before cutting to an equally dramatic shot of a ridge beneath blue sky and drifting clouds. Lluis is saying that it’s his last night there, and Chris asks him what he wants to do with it. It’s clear that whatever they have been doing with their time together, they’re going to miss it.

Ten years later, they are walking through the streets of Milngavie. The time in between is barely discussed, but it’s apparent that they haven’t seen each other. Pleased to be together again, their heads full of the dreams of the past, they wander past Greggs and Timpson and a shop whose windows are covered in posters of mountains with the word ‘explore’ blazoned across them, reaching the monument that marks the start of the West Highland Way. This, and the Cape Wrath Trail, they plan to conquer, having set themselves the ambitious time of 28 days. That’s a little over 20km – about 12 and a half miles – per day. Easy enough, you might think, but the ground is uneven, much of it is very steep, and then there’s the weather.

There are lots of different reasons why people attempt this walk, and others like it. We hear some of them from the people whom Chris and Lluis meet along the way. Chris himself is planning to start a family with his partner, and wants to take time out for an adventure whilst he still can, though it’s apparent that what he sees as maturity and a healthy, normal life is already encroaching on his freedom: he gets multiple calls from his boss, trying o get him to do work whilst he’s there, complaining about him being unavailable and struggling with the concept that there are still parts of the world where one can’t get a mobile phone signal. Lluis’ reasons are more obscure, and change over time, initially centred on proving something to himself, then becoming more about being close to nature and finding a different way of living. Each man worries that the other is wasting his life, though the privilege of convention means Chris is the one who feels superior enough to talk about it.

The walk is hard. Lluis struggles with a strained knee. They both attract midges. An experiment in navigating without the aid of GPS leads them astray (though they’re really pretty lucky – every year there are people who die due to losing their way in the mountains). From time to time there are bothies to stay in, offering varying degrees of comfort, and everyone they meet seems nice, but still, the experience puts a strain on their friendship, especially after Chris learns that Lluis hasn’t told him about a major incident in his life.

Making this film inevitably required cast and crew to walk much of the route themselves. The toughest parts of it cannot be reached by road. As the landscape looks drastically different in different weather, planning will have been difficult, with only a few key scenes able to be fully scripted ahead of time. Twan Peeters’ cinematography had to be figured out in the moment. That’s ideal in a way – one of the striking things about the highlands is the way they can catch one by surprise, a sudden turn or drifting cloud seeing a mountain loom up out of nowhere, abruptly changing one’s sense of perspective. This element doesn’t come into play much, however. There’s some creative work when Chris is walking alone through woodland. Elsewhere, Peeters struggles to get away from familiar tourist board images, except for the parts they never show you – what it’s like to trudge through mud under torrents of rain, or to set up a tent whilst being lashed by a force 8 gale.

That’s not to say that there is nothing to catch the eye here. Far from it. This is stunning country under any circumstances, and if you can’t be there in person, watching this on a big screen is the next best thing. Dark slopes wreathed in mist, silvery lochs snaking through the glens and, towards the end, stunning seascapes, the wide white sandy beaches of the north coast in all their loveliness. The slow pace of the narrative allows plenty of time to take it all in. At times one suspects this may have got the better of editor Gijs Walstra, as the story does begin to drag, with not quite enough material to sustain the development of its overarching idea. Nevertheless, there’s a lot to enjoy, and some viewers will do doubt be inspired to take on these trails for themselves.

Reviewed on: 25 Apr 2026