Northbound Review: Warm Performances and an Uneven Share of the Story

Arthur has been thrown out of his care home, but the reprimand is directed at his grandson. The administrator invokes the institution’s enlightened values while Kevin receives the report on his grandfather’s behavior. Arthur, played by Bruce Dern, has earned the complaint: drunken golf-cart driving with a sex worker is a fairly decisive breach of residential etiquette. Still, the arrangement of the conversation matters. Before William Scoular’s Northbound sends its characters toward Canada, it establishes an older man whose conduct is everyone’s business and whose preferences seem to require someone else’s permission.

Dern gives Arthur enough appetite for trouble to make Kevin’s discomfort understandable. He also makes the wish beneath the trouble worth taking seriously. Arthur wants to return to the Canadian whisky distillery he founded and the ex-wife, played by Joanna Cassidy, he still loves. His family has another care facility in mind.

When he persuades Kevin, played by Hunter Parrish, to drive him roughly 2,000 miles from Arizona instead, the decision briefly rearranges their relationship. The supposedly irresponsible grandfather supplies a destination; the responsible grandson must decide to follow him. Their affection becomes visible through that small reversal of authority.

Ashlin Halfnight’s screenplay gets easy comic mileage from the friction between them. Arthur treats embarrassment as something other people should endure; Kevin would prefer to prevent it. Dern and Parrish make that opposition enjoyable, particularly when Arthur’s romantic advice brings Lancelot and Guinevere into a bedtime conversation. Kevin, busy moisturizing, rejects the masculine ideals attached to the Round Table.

The joke works through juxtaposition, placing Arthur’s heroic reference beside Kevin’s unheroic evening routine. It also reveals how quickly the writing sorts them into generational categories. The older man acts, the younger man objects, and a potentially revealing disagreement becomes another demonstration of their assigned temperaments.

Arthur is most engaging when his behavior resists that sorting. His longing for his former wife and the distillery gives his stubbornness a particular address, rather than leaving Dern to manufacture personality from rude remarks. The film allows us to enjoy him without needing every provocation to contain a lesson. That distinction grows harder to preserve as Kevin’s future takes over the story. Arthur’s return begins to matter increasingly for what it might teach his grandson, and the older man’s unfinished business becomes material for someone else’s change of direction.

Kevin’s connection to the threatened distillery has a sound emotional basis: childhood memories of whisky making link the business to a life he once understood. His present law-firm job offers little comparable attraction. This weakens the central decision between returning to that life and taking responsibility for the family enterprise.

A dramatic dilemma gains pressure when each option asks the character to surrender something valuable. Here, the screenplay makes the emotional case for the distillery while leaving Kevin’s existing life looking like something he should already have abandoned. Parrish can supply the hesitation, but he cannot supply missing reasons to hesitate. We wait for Kevin to catch up with the film’s preference.

Julia Fox changes that experience when she enters as a hitchhiker. Her guarded presentation and undisclosed reasons for traveling create questions that the grandfather-grandson pairing has largely stopped generating. With Arthur and Kevin, we understand the habits that will produce the next argument. With Fox’s character, we have to reconsider what we think we know about another passenger. She is an effective addition because she changes how we watch the exchanges, bringing a private urgency into a car already occupied by family grievances.

The difficulty is what happens once her circumstances demand serious attention. Her need to reach Canada introduces stakes that sit uneasily beside Kevin’s dissatisfaction with his career, yet his family decision retains the greater dramatic weight. The film need not become an entirely different sort of drama to accommodate her. It does need to give the predicament it introduces sufficient room to affect its priorities. Fox makes that possibility appealing, and her limited development leaves the impression that the screenplay welcomes her capacity to unsettle the trip without fully accepting the complications she brings.

The landscape offers a gentler, more successful way of expanding the film’s meaning. Cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr. moves from Arizona’s dry surroundings toward wooded roads and lakes, giving the destination an appeal we can feel without another argument about family duty. The repeated aerial views are familiar road-movie devices, but they have a useful function here. Seen from above, the roads place the travelers inside an environment that gradually changes around them. Canada’s appeal becomes something the images establish alongside Arthur’s insistence. The scenery helps explain his attachment while leaving room for Kevin to discover an attachment of his own.

The soundtrack leaves less room for discovery. A needle-drop is an existing recording placed into a film, carrying its own associations into the scene. Trooper’s “Raise a Little Hell” gives Arthur’s opening rebellion an immediate, cheerful endorsement; the later use of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” supplies a ready vocabulary of intimacy and remembered belonging. I enjoy the directness of the first choice. It lets us share Arthur’s pleasure in being difficult before asking us to worry about him. The Keane selection has a heavier task because the story is asking music to help turn that enjoyment into tenderness.

There is real feeling available in Kevin’s childhood connection to the distillery, and a familiar song can bring it within reach. Yet the musical invitation to remember also smooths over differences between the travelers’ desires. Kevin is discovering a possible future in a place Arthur associates with his own past. Arthur’s wish to reconnect with his ex-wife involves a relationship that precedes his grandson’s memories and cannot be explained by them. As the music gathers those attachments into a shared feeling of home, the film gives less attention to the parts of Arthur’s return that Kevin cannot inherit.

Northbound premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 17, 2026, with international sales handled by Hyde Park International. Directed by William Scoular, the heartwarming road trip comedy follows an octogenarian rogue who breaks out of his nursing home and convinces his reluctant grandson to drive him across the country to Canada to reconnect with his ex-wife and reclaim his legacy.

Full Credits

• Title: Northbound

• Distributor: Hyde Park International, Gatehouse Productions, Lumanity, Beyond the Frame

• Release date: August 17, 2026 (Edinburgh International Film Festival)

• Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes (92 minutes)

• Director: William Scoular

• Writers: Ashlin Halfnight, William Scoular

• Producers and Executive Producers: Robert Budreau, Andrew Bronfman, Jason Ross Jallet, Saad Siddiqui, William Scoular, Jonathan Bronfman, Wendy La Brier

• Cast: Bruce Dern, Hunter Parrish, Julia Fox, Joanna Cassidy, Dylan Baker, Carmen Araiza, Jenni Burke, Walter Borden

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Peter Menzies Jr.

• Editors: William Scoular

• Composer: Anne Nikitin