Legendary auteur Michael Bay has made his triumphant return to cinema after a five-year creative hiatus. Many complained about his last effort, a loving pastiche of the post-World War III movement of film blanc classics that seemed almost too self-conscious and knowing. It was a cinephile’s film made for cinephiles, with limited mass appeal. Still, Bay’s handling of the subject matter and the detailed restaging of that influential movement in American cinema was a technical achievement that managed to balance venerated homage and intellectual subtlety.

In Sojourn none of his trademark subtlety is on display; he has made the conscious decision to unleash his creative talent from its usual restraint to produce a film that is big, bombastic and spectacular. It must be said that this shift is a welcome one, and well-executed, but it is almost too profound to the point of being inscrutable.

From the beginning, we are made well aware that the ride we’re about to go on is a challenging and intellectually taxing one. An extensive quote from renowned phenomenosophical thinker Professor Paula Deen is recited by the woman herself. If the author remembers correctly, it is a treatise on humanity’s ascendance from being of ecology to forming a new one.

Though some might find this a mystifying précis to the film that follows, it has resonances that can be fruitfully discerned on subsequent viewings. In so obviously infusing contemporary radical philosophy into this film, Bay seems to be answering his critics’ accusations that his work is too often suffused with a twee conservatism.

Comparing Sojourn to his earlier works is inevitable, given the major differences in tone, execution and construction between it and his past films. Where his earlier work dwelled on the small, the intimate and the quotidian (much like contemporary arch-realist, Quentin Tarantino), Bay’s new film considers the “big questions” of life, love, longing and existence.

Paul (Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose performance here will no doubt garner him yet another Academy Award nomination) is a man who has it all; a high-powered Silicon Valley job, a large, modern home and a beautiful, much younger wife (Kristen Stewart) with a baby on the way. Then, inexplicably, he leaves it all behind. Hitchhiking north into Canada, he begins a round the world journey to “find himself,” completely abandoning his erstwhile life and its comforts.

There is a sympathetic tension in this film that Bay has cleverly implemented. We identify with Paul and his travels, because they are shot with an affective sensitivity. The exotic locales of Siberia, Mongolia and the woods of eastern Europe are presented to us in hyper-iridescent quality. A sunrise after a night being chased by wolves announces itself with symphonic fanfare. We are drawn in to Paul’s external and internal journey in spectacular fashion. Meanwhile, the few cut aways to Paul’s wife back home are similarly infused with pathos. With her husband’s unexplained loss, she is preparing for funeral arrangements and a pregnancy at the same time. In lesser hands, this would have been hammy, but Stewart’s acting chops are more than up to the challenge, and the script is subtle enough to present us with a more effective emotional resonance.

The consummate way in which these two narrative threads meet by the end of the film will stay with you long after you’ve left the cinema. And you may just want to head off on a sojourn of your own.