In a harsh world, porridge provides.
This is somewhat of a difficult review to write. Usually I throw on something in the background for ambient noise. An optional distraction my eyes can wander over to when the novelty of writing wears thin. One small problem: The Golden Spurtle is the movie I started while writing this. It felt like an obvious choice, yet here I am. 20 minutes have disappeared and only two paragraphs are on the page. Once again I have been sucked into watching people take oatmeal very seriously.
The Golden Spurtle is a bright spark of charm, quirk, and passion. As many people from small towns will tell you, pitching a documentary as being “about the quirky characters in a small town” is an immediate red flag. Great, somebody took a camera crew to a village of people minding their business and filmed until they got some kooky characters. Groundbreaking.
Director Constantine Costi had other ideas.
What is The Golden Spurtle?
One year the city council of the sleepy Scottish village of Carrbridge decided they needed something to drum up tourism outside of the summer months. Thus Carrbridge started the World Porridge Making Championship. Each year a tight-knit group of locals and an ever-increasing crowd of international competitors crowd into a small community center to combine oats, water, salt, and heat in just the right quantities. Each year the winner takes home the titular Golden Spurtle, a gold-plated jewel-encrusted decorative version of the porridge-stirring utensil you probably learned about when you Googled it the first time I said “spurtle.”
What is The Golden Spurtle (2025)?
76 minutes of heaven, that’s what it is. Mechanically it’s a doc in danger of being labeled “Wes Anderson-core” because it’s shot on film, cropped to 4:3, and has a soundtrack whimsical enough for cheery piano and mischievous oboe to regularly appear in the mix.
The documentary charts the days leading up to the final year the WPMC will be organized by Charlie Miller, a kindly retiree who both organizes the event and dedicates his carpentry workshop to producing handmade wooden spurtles to sell in the WPMC’s gift shop.
The documentary bounces between the fascinating folks of Carrbridge and a handful of competitors from outside Scotland. A vitally important detail: the competition does not matter. Banish from your mind the idea you can suss out who might win early on. Costi and crew are more interested in the humanity of Carrbridge, rather than try and graft the framework of a sports competition narrative onto what is ostensibly a room full of people cooking near-identical bowls of food several times in a row.
Instead The Golden Spurtle chooses its moments carefully. Each of the 76 minutes feels intentional. Is it important to porridge that they spend several minutes in Carrbridge church, including a brief clip of a kindly old woman singing a hymn in Gaelic for the camera crew’s benefit? No, but it paints an indelible picture of what things are like in the town.
My favorite example is early on in the doc when we see a local artist named Alison. That’s her credit. “Alison, local artist.” We find her in her studio, dusting off a sculpture and musing aloud “Now that’s one that probably should have increased in value with age.” She glances back at the crew and adds, matter-of-factly “the rest are shite.”
Does she do promotional art for the competition? Is she going to enter? Is she in any way related? Nope. She’s just a local the crew talked to and had fun filming her showing off her artwork. At one point she’s gearing up into a poignant statement about Carrbridge, talking about how it’s a village with some dreamers, with some doers, but she’s cut off by a cuckoo clock. It has very little to do with the overall story of the documentary, but it serves as a little slice of life that dovetails nicely into the following interview clip.
Who wins doesn’t matter. To the point the documentary unceremoniously stops caring about the competitors while charting the actual day of the competition. It’s Charlie’s last year. Who loses and when is secondary to following his final presentation (and the community’s attempt to thank him, in suitably understated small-town ways).
How Can I Watch The Golden Spurtle?
Therein lies the problem with finding out about a documentary relatively soon after it comes out: distribution is a nightmare. I’m currently several months into waiting for the ability to watch Python People.
Up until February 20th, there was a good stretch where you could rent The Golden Spurtle from Letterboxd Video for $15 USD. If one were… dedicated, they could use a VPN connected to a server in the UK and simply simply rent/purchase the video on YouTube for a smidge cheaper than that. And it comes with the added benefit of sticking in your account even when you turn off the VPN, as YouTube owned inventories are global (for now).
Regardless of where, but highly dependenant on when/where you are, it’s entirely possible you can watch it online for a fair price, if not be lucky enough to attend an actual screening.
Since first watching in late January, The Golden Spurtle has become the movie equivalent of a comfortable chair. I settle into it. It soothes the mental aches of the day. If this at all sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to seek it out and watch it however you can. I know I very much look forward to a physical release (you hear me, Umbrella? You’ve got at least one overseas customer hoping for it)!
Gavin Gaddis Reviews 