The North (2025)
Directed by Bart Schrijver
No — The North is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Two men walk across Scotland for thirty days.
Consciousness Markers
Lluis has quit his job and resists conventional career expectations, and the film treats this with a degree of sympathy. The contrast between his path and Chris's corporate trajectory is present but not polemical.
The two leads are Dutch and Spanish respectively, which constitutes an international pairing. This appears to be a natural consequence of the story being semi-autobiographical rather than a deliberate casting intervention.
The film's reverence for Scottish Highland landscapes and its semi-documentary naturalism carry a faint implicit environmentalist sensibility. It stops well short of advocacy.
The film gestures toward some thematic territory around modern masculinity and the costs of conventional success, but critics note it avoids forcing epiphanies. The lecturing impulse appears to have been left in the tent.
No LGBTQ+ themes, characters, or subtext are present in the film. Two men hiking together and discussing their feelings does not, on its own, qualify.
There is no feminist content of any kind. The film is, in fact, entirely about men talking to other men about being men, which is its own kind of statement.
Race is not a theme, a subject of dialogue, or a narrative lens in this film. The characters' different nationalities are incidental to the story.
No body positivity content is present. The characters are, by virtue of hiking 600 kilometers, in reasonably functional physical condition.
No neurodivergence themes or characters are present in any form.
The film has no historical dimension whatsoever. It is about two men walking across Scotland, not reinterpreting the past.
Why it received this score
Two men walk across Scotland for thirty days. This is the premise. This is also, largely, the film. Bart Schrijver's The North follows Chris and Lluis, former roommates now separated by a decade and diverging life philosophies, as they complete 600 kilometers of Highland trail in what the film presents as an act of reconnection. Chris is preparing to start a family and has a career. Lluis has quit his job and has questions. The Scottish landscape, filmed with a six-person crew carrying their own gear, is magnificent and indifferent to both of them, which is precisely correct.
The film's social consciousness, such as it is, operates at a whisper. Lluis's resistance to conventional employment could be read as a mild critique of the professional treadmill, and the film does extend him a certain quiet sympathy. A faint environmentalist sensibility hums beneath the surface, in the way that any film spending this much time among mountains and lochs implicitly argues for their continued existence. These are not positions so much as atmospheric conditions. The film is far more interested in what two men actually say to each other after a decade of silence than in delivering verdicts on capitalism or the state of the planet.
What is most striking, in the context of contemporary cinema, is what The North declines to do. It does not editorialize about its characters' nationalities, does not position their friendship as a symbol of anything geopolitical, and does not manufacture a cathartic breakthrough on schedule. The Guardian called it "purifying and uplifting." That assessment is correct, and also a useful reminder that a film can be genuinely moving without requiring the audience to update their priors on any social issue. The North is, in the taxonomy of this exercise, a remarkably quiet specimen.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A decade after they were best friends and roommates, Chris and Lluis set out on a 600 kilometer hike through the Scottish Highlands to reconnect with each other, nature and parts of themselves they lost.
Questions about The North
Is The North woke?
No — The North is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The North have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Eat the Rich at 10.
How does The North compare to other 2025 movies?
It ranks #193 of the 217 films from 2025 we've scored; their average is 26. The wokest is STRAW (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.