Ah, the wondrous work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. During their two decades of collaboration in the 1940s and ’50s, they released a remarkable run of films, including one each year of World War II. Near the end of the war, they had hoped to make A Matter of Life and Death, but their vision for that project demanded color film, something nearly impossible to obtain for commercial use in the mid-1940s (their vision would come alive in 1946!). In the meantime, Powell and Pressburger turned their attention to a black-and-white picture they could film on location off Scotland’s west coast. The result is I Know Where I’m Going!, a soft yet surprisingly profound work that must have resonated deeply when it premiered just a few months after the war’s end.

Today, The Criterion Collection is releasing a new 4K edition of I Know Where I’m Going!, sourced from the film’s 2023 restoration, finally upgrading their home video edition originally released on DVD around a quarter century ago! For at least the past fifteen years I’ve been eagerly waiting for an upgrade. It was worth the wait. The new transfer is gorgeous, crisp without losing the film’s natural softness. As is often the case, the Criterion release includes a restoration featurette among the supplements, and it’s the kind of behind-the-scenes look that always delights me. My thanks to everyone who put in the painstaking work to make this edition shine.

At first glance, it’s a light film. We meet Joan Webster (played by Wendy Hiller) in a montage that carries us from her infancy to a meeting with her banker (or is it a meeting with her father? they are one and the same) when she’s twenty-five, confident, ambitious, and certain she knows the right path ahead and is fixed on it. For Joan, that path means stepping up a rung or two in wealth and class. She informs her father, with brisk certainty, that she’s engaged to a wealthy industrialist and is already on her way to his private island off the coast of Scotland to be married.

I love the opening scene because it fizzes with energy: Hiller power-walks through a crowd, orders her drinks with authority, and approaches her father as if she has the world neatly mapped out. Powell and Pressburger often frame her looking off screen to the right, a visual cue established in these early scenes, where her future seems to be just in sight.

As Joan boards the train, she settles in with the same precision we’ve already seen: she tucks her luggage into place, smooths her coat, and studies the map and itinerary she has arranged down to the minute. It’s a wonderfully composed moment, her future laid out as neatly as the timetable in her hands, and it invites us to think we know where the film is headed as well. Joan seems to be a woman on a straight, confident track.

To an extent, we do know where this film is going. Joan’s confidence promises the familiar arc of disruption and self-discovery. And soon we are proven right: shortly the film hints that the ground beneath her is less solid than she believes. One of the first hurdles comes as she drifts to sleep on the train: her orderly plans dissolve into a surreal nightmare, revealing a host of anxieties and uncertainties she has been keeping at bay. Beneath her polished certainty, something unsettled is already stirring..

Another hurdle appears when she reaches the final stretch of her journey. The island and her future are just on the horizon, on the other side of a narrow body of water. But her itinerary didn’t account for the fog rolling across the sea. With visibility gone, the boat that should have met her can’t even attempt the crossing, and Joan finds herself unexpectedly stranded at the edge of her destination.

But even if we have a sense where this film is going, it soon becomes clear that the route is more important than the destination, which may, in the end, prove irrelevant altogether. Stranded at the threshold of her carefully plotted future, Joan meets the warm and quietly observant Torquil MacNeil (played by the ever-welcome Roger Livesey). That night, she prays the wind will rise and blow the fog away; in the morning, Torquil gently teases that she must have prayed a little too hard. The fog is gone, but the wind she prayed for has turned into a gale. He, too, wishes to reach the island, but there’s no telling when that will be possible

One of the things I love is the way Powell and Pressburger frame their encounters. Joan is still often shown gazing offscreen, toward the future she believes she’s moving toward. Torquil, meanwhile, is frequently shown looking at her. His attention is rooted in the present moment, not in some distant horizon. It’s a subtle visual language that begins charting the emotional geography of the film long before either character fully realizes what’s happening.

Ah, but under the surface, they do know what’s happening. Increasingly distressed that the future she’s been springing toward is delayed, and now with something to run from, Joan reaches instinctively for the tactic that has always worked for her and tries to get to her future by sheer force of will. But that’s not as easy as one might have thought.

In the end, I Know Where I’m Going! becomes one of Powell and Pressburger’s gentlest arguments against the seductions of material ambition. Joan begins the film convinced that security, status, and wealth are the makings of a meaningful life; by the close, she discovers a world measured instead in community, sincerity, and a kind of spiritual rootedness that can’t be bought or scheduled. The Archers knew, in the waning days of wartime Britain, that audiences were reassessing what truly mattered, and they crafted a film that quietly affirms the richness of chosen connection over the glitter of possession. For all its charm and humor, the film carries this conviction to its core: that knowing where you’re going matters far less than discovering what, and whom, you’re willing to go there with.