Remember Lasse Hallström? Once upon a time, he was one of Hollywood’s go-to filmmakers for prestige-friendly, sentimental Oscar bait. For obvious reasons, the industry has changed, and Hallström’s brand of cinema has practically gone extinct, which is why he’s been tackling YA fare of late.
Amazon/MGM has released the trailer for next month’s “The Map That Leads to You,” based on the novel of the same name by J.P. Monninger. Hallström is directing. This marks the Swedish filmmaker’s first U.S. film since 2018’s “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms,” although he also helmed “Helma” in his native country and TV series “The Darkness.”
“The Map That Leads to You,” a coming-of-age romance, hits theaters August 20. The film follows Heather (Madelyn Cline), a recent grad backpacking across Europe with friends, whose impulsive encounter with Jack (KJ Apa) spirals into a “journey of self-discovery.”
One look at Hallström’s output these last 20 years, and you notice titles like “Dear John,” “Safe Haven,” “A Dog’s Purpose,” “Salmon Fishing in Yemen,” and “The Hundred-Foot Journey.” At least, he made “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,” which is an underseen gem.
Hallström’s broke through internationally with “My Life as a Dog”(1985), a tender coming-of-age tale that earned him Oscar nominations and caught the eye of Hollywood studios desperate for a touch of European artistry. By the late ’90s and early 2000s, Hallström had fully crossed over, directing glossy, awards-bait dramas like “The Cider House Rules,” “Chocolat,” and “The Shipping News.”
Far and away, Hallström’s best film is “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, one of the defining indie dramas of the ’90s, a raw, simply told, and deeply human portrait of small-town America. It’s the film that gave Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar nomination, and further proved Johnny Depp‘s talents . Everything Hallström’s later work tried to recapture was already perfected here.
So what happened? In short, the industry moved on. The kind of safe, sentimental, literary dramas that defined Hallström’s peak fell out of fashion as studios chased franchises and mid-budget filmmaking got devoured. And Hallström, unlike some of his peers, never reinvented himself.
Either way, it’s worth remembering that for a solid two decades, this quiet Swedish director was one of the most bankable names in Hollywood melodrama.