Borges and Me Review: Genius, Loneliness and the Scottish Road

Jay Parini arrives at St Andrews in 1971 carrying the kind of ambition that has no practical shape yet. He wants to become a poet, which his academic surroundings regard with roughly the same enthusiasm they might reserve for an unexploded shell. His supervisor, Alastair Reid, prefers scholarship to aspiration. Parini, meanwhile, is haunted by cassette recordings from his younger brother Billy, serving in Vietnam after a decision Parini fears he helped encourage. Then Jorge Luis Borges enters his life.

Marc Turtletaub’s Borges and Me, adapted from Parini’s embellished memoir, understands the strange imbalance of this encounter. Parini barely appreciates the literary giant placed in his care. Borges, 72 and blind, depends upon this uncertain young man to move through Scotland. One is searching desperately for someone who can teach him how to become a writer. The other has already become so thoroughly identified with writing that separating the man from the reputation has grown difficult.

The Man Performing Borges

Luis Gnecco plays Borges as someone perpetually halfway between sage and troublesome child. He tells the nervous Parini to speak louder because he is blind, licks the leather binding of an Encyclopedia Britannica because some books ought to be tasted, then urinates outside while his unwilling companion suffers the social consequences. Gnecco gives each act a faint ceremonial quality, as though Borges has spent decades learning how eccentricity can become its own language.

There is calculation inside the charm. Borges has learned to rely upon translators, hosts and strangers, and his blindness makes that reliance unavoidable. His fame complicates it further. People do not merely help him. They submit to the privilege of helping him.

Gnecco understands this without turning Borges cruel. His upward gaze never becomes an actorly shortcut for blindness. His dependence can seem manipulative in one scene, painfully exposed in the next. When Borges asks Parini about his romantic life, the conversation briefly strips away the practiced aphorisms. Regret appears. So does loneliness.

The title points toward Borges’ own “Borges and I,” a piece concerned with the distance between private self and public author. Turtletaub keeps returning to that divide through Gnecco’s performance. Borges seems to be acting as Borges because perhaps, after so many years, there is no clean way to stop.

Parini becomes his Sancho Panza, a comparison the film eventually makes literal through visions of Don Quixote and his companion. The joke contains something melancholy. Borges can summon imaginary figures from literature with ease. Ordinary intimacy proves harder.

Poets on the Road

Blindness gives the Scottish road trip its most beautiful premise. Borges asks Parini to describe the Highlands to him, turning landscape into language before it can become experience. The arrangement should place the film comfortably inside Borges’ own fascination with unstable reality. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it produces Borges falling into Loch Ness.

The sequence has a cheerful absurdity. Borges wants to be rowed onto the water so he can commune with the presence of the monster, falls in, is rescued, then appears comfortably drying himself later. Since Parini’s memoir openly plays with invention, implausibility belongs to the material. Still, the scene exposes a persistent tension. The film likes the idea of reality becoming fiction, yet its filmmaking rarely becomes strange enough to make that transformation feel dangerous.

Peter Mullan’s George Mackay Brown supplies a quieter variation on literary mythology. Parini travels toward Orkney intending to interview the reclusive poet for his doctoral work. Brown speaks of beer, admits that he lives excessively inside his own head, and calls a poem the next best thing to silence. Mullan barely pushes. His restraint makes Brown feel resistant to the grand mythology surrounding writers.

Borges and Brown never meet, which initially feels like a peculiar dramatic refusal. It becomes oddly appropriate. Parini is moving through incompatible models of authorship rather than collecting masters for one neat lesson. Reid represents literature examined from a university desk. Brown distrusts artistic mythology. Borges behaves as if literature and existence are already hopelessly entangled.

The film loses some of its pulse when Borges disappears for a stretch and Parini grows close to a poetry-loving hotel worker played by Freya Mavor. Their connection has warmth, yet removing Gnecco leaves a noticeable hollow space. Perhaps absence is the first lesson Borges teaches without intending to.

Ghosts at Culloden

The visit to Culloden battlefield finally allows Turtletaub’s direction to think in something approaching Borges’ language. Parini brings Borges to the site of the 1746 battle, and the dead seem to rise through imagination. History ceases to behave like a completed event. The battlefield becomes memory, story and present tense at once.

It is a brief rupture in a film that often prefers discussing metaphysical ideas to embodying them. Here, the boundary softens. Borges cannot see the field before him, yet he appears to perceive something Parini cannot. Sight becomes the less interesting form of vision.

That distinction has been waiting beneath the road trip all along. Parini keeps looking for someone who can explain how a writer is made. Borges offers no usable curriculum. He urinates beside libraries, chases monsters he cannot see, invokes fictional knights and listens for armies buried beneath Scottish soil. The lesson, if it can be called one, arrives as a ghost story. A writer may begin by seeing what is there. Borges is interested in what remains after seeing has failed.

Borges and Me is a nostalgic literary comedy-drama film directed by Marc Turtletaub that premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 15, 2026, ahead of its theatrical release on November 6, 2026. Based on Jay Parini’s novelized memoir set in the early 1970s, the story follows a young American PhD student in Scotland who is tasked with taking the celebrated, partially blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges on an unpredictable Morris Minor road trip across the Scottish Highlands. You will be able to watch the film in select theaters nationwide upon its release.

Full Credits

• Title: Borges and Me

• Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

• Release date: November 6, 2026

• Rating: PG-13

• Running time: 104 minutes

• Director: Marc Turtletaub

• Writers: Oren Moverman, Jay Parini

• Producers and Executive Producers: Marc Turtletaub, Peter Saraf, Dries Phlypo, Kevan Van Thompson, Alex Turtletaub, Michael B. Clark

• Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Luis Gnecco, Peter Mullan, Alan Cumming, Freya Mavor, Eilidh Loan, Morven Christie, Dylan Blore

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Christopher Norr

• Editors: Joe Landauer

• Composer: Volker Bertelmann