After working on their respective short films and co-directing the documentary short Dollar Pizza Documentary, Brooklyn-based filmmakers Travis Wood and Alex Mallis are upping the ante as their debut feature The Travel Companion is having its world premiere in the US Narrative Competition section of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.
The movie, as with most first-time features, acts as a glimpse into the directing duo’s personal lores. In particular, Simon (Tristan Turner), a frequently broke documentarian, is Wood’s emotional surrogate, tasked to remain in the good graces of his flatmate and longtime best pal, Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck), to enjoy the free flights he offers as an airline employee, a precious perk soon jeopardized by the latter’s budding romance with an up-and-coming filmmaker, Beatrice (Naomi Asa)—a fragile and fraught experience that Wood himself went through in the past. And how else can a filmmaker reckon with the incoherence of departure but render it on the screen? At the same time, the movie reflects the directors’ shared history and struggle as independent artists out to prove their mettle in a steadily precarious filmmaking terrain, on top of the fact that the story is also set in New York, where the two are trying to map out their promising careers.
The narrative machinations fit right into the comedy drama canon, and what follows is a warm yet achingly legible portrait of a friendship that has long run its course (think Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy) but also of the punishing material demands of being an independent artist forced to pull yourself out of a creative rut and simultaneously fight for survival.
The free travel, in this case, is not just a precious perk but a lifeline to Simon’s creative pursuit, as it allows him to shoot as much footage as he could for his microbudget documentary that’s long been in the woodwork but has yet to find a real anchor. (Later, it turns into an experimental film project centered on walls, with a sappy, Teen Vogue-ish title.) Simon is sweet but at the same time annoying and can’t read the room, and the insecurity that gnaws at him exists on both existential and economic levels. The Travel Companion, penned by Mallis and Wood along with Weston Auburn, clues us in on this premise from the get-go, opening with a scene where a moderator facilitates a post-screening talkback with a group of budding filmmakers, including Simon, who’s placed at the far end and literally had no chance to speak. Bruce attends the screening, and there they meet Beatrice, who’s among the participating directors, and invites her to a drink at a casual Brooklyn bar. Their conversations immediately lapse into the free flights, which Simon almost always happens to bring up, and right then and there we could sense the awkward tension the topic generates, and, as we might have expected, will soon reveal more fractures between Simon and Bruce.
The directors, alongside cinematographer Jason Chiu, present a nearly unpolished aesthetic, and shoot their actors with intimate close-ups and too often we find them nestling in a seat—public bench, front stoop, theater house, boarding lounge, you name it—or strolling around the city, talking just about anything, as if we’re viewing a Modern Love episode. The Travel Companion luxuriates in these moments, which basically makes it a mumblecore. We coast through the movie just as the protagonist lives off his travel companion status. This feeling also has to do with the directing duo’s fluency to draw out understated yet astonishingly sincere performances from their acting trio. Turner plays his part with a kind of energy that gets under your skin but also makes you aware that it’s just the lack of security and fear of purpose talking. Oberbeck flows so fluidly as the patient, nonconfrontational type, even as he knows that he’s already outgrown his friendship with Simon. Asa displays an incredible commitment to a character who simply cuts through the facade and does not recoil so easily.
Like the best microbudget indies, The Travel Companion does not resort to cinematic pyrotechnics; instead it banks on good storytelling. Every frame feels particularly sober, nearly absent of any visual artificiality, and inseparable from its locale. Before us is a New York that is raw and rich with possibilities, yet by drawing focus to something so granular and common, the movie is able to shrewdly examine the labor, literally and figuratively, it actually takes to have the privilege to call yourself an artist and make a living out of it, as in moving to a high-maintenance city to become a writer, to the extent that it renders relationships transactional at best. It argues that our protagonist’s existential crisis is deeply rooted in the socioeconomic inequality that he wrestles with. The script extends him some grace, while also not giving him a free pass for how he treats the people around him; if you think he’s the villain, then you totally miss the point. Which is to say, The Travel Companion is less a movie about one’s artistic ego than a movie about the material impossibility of forging genuine connections in a cutthroat creative economy, in a world that is increasingly becoming inhospitable. It’s a fine, curious, and singularly human debut that signals what is to come for Mallis and Wood and one that might just be a new indie hit this summer.
The Travel Companion recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Tribeca site for the title.
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