The Golden Spurtle (2025)
Every now and then a documentary arrives that makes you wonder how nobody thought to make it sooner. The Golden Spurtle (2025) trains its camera on Carrbridge, a small Highland village in the Cairngorms, which has hosted the World Porridge Making Championship since 1994. The competition is as straightforward and as strange as it sounds: contestants from across the globe turn up with oats, salt, and water, and attempt to produce the finest bowl of traditional porridge. The winner takes home a hand-carved wooden spurtle (that is, the traditional Scottish implement used to stir the stuff) and, rather more importantly, the right to call themselves World Porridge Champion. It is the sort of tradition that feels thoroughly, irreducibly Scottish, bound up in a community's sense of identity and good-natured pride in something the rest of the world largely considers a Monday morning inconvenience.
The film is a co-production between the United Kingdom and Australia, handled by Hopscotch Films, and runs a trim 75 minutes, which feels about right for the subject. Behind the camera is Constantine Costi, an Australian director whose previous work has leaned towards character-led, observational documentary filmmaking. That background suits him well here. He is not coming at this as an outsider taking the mick, nor as a local advocate with an axe to grind; the tone he strikes is warm and genuinely curious, the approach of someone who finds people interesting on their own terms. It is worth noting that this kind of modest, community-rooted documentary sits in a lineage stretching back decades, from the participatory human portraits found in films like Cannibal Tours to the quieter end of observational filmmaking. Getting that register right is harder than it looks, and the choice of subject here carries its own built-in tension: an ailing Porridge Chieftain (the ceremonial head of proceedings) is searching for a successor, which gives the film a gentle dramatic spine beyond the competition itself.
The on-screen personalities are the film's real currency. Toby Wilson, Ian Bishop, Charlie Miller, Lisa Williams, and Adam Kiani form the core of the cast, though in a film like this the line between cast and subject is a pleasantly blurry one. These are real competitors and community figures rather than performers, and Costi's camera gives them room to breathe and reveal themselves at their own pace. There is something refreshing about a documentary that trusts its subjects to be interesting without goading them into conflict or packaging their stories into tidy arcs. For those who have enjoyed other food or culture-adjacent documentaries, the dynamic here is not entirely unlike the community specificity found in short-form work such as Nom Tèw, where the food itself becomes a lens through which a whole set of human relationships comes into focus. Whether Costi's subjects rise to that kind of emotional resonance is, of course, for Macca to weigh in on.
I will admit that my viewing habits occasionally lead me down some truly bizarre rabbit holes, and this film is absolute proof that I will literally watch anything.
Enter The Golden Spurtle (2025), directed by Constantine Costi, a documentary that turns its lens on the fiercely competitive World Porridge Championships held in a tiny, windswept Scottish town. The premise alone is enough to raise an eyebrow: a cadre of earnest contestants slaving over oats, all vying for the titular "Golden Spurtle," a bespoke trophy lovingly crafted by the head judge. It sounds like the setup for a niche comedy sketch, but Costi plays it entirely straight.
Funnily enough, what could have easily been a bit of a mess or a total snooze-fest is actually a surprisingly endearing and well-made piece of cinema. The charm of the picture lies entirely in the sheer, unadulterated seriousness with which the competitors treat their oat-based creations. There is a genuine warmth to the way Costi captures the local community and the eccentric personalities involved. You find yourself genuinely rooting for these folks, caught up in the high-stakes drama of texture, temperature, and traditional stirring techniques. It’s a cracking display of human passion applied to the most mundane of breakfast foods.
This is precisely where the film earns its keep. It stands as brilliant proof that if you get the delivery and the content right, absolutely any subject can make for a highly engaging documentary. Costi doesn't need to rely on manufactured drama or heavy-handed exposition; the inherent absurdity and heart of the event do all the heavy lifting. It’s a sharp reminder that you don't need grand, sweeping historical epics or true-crime scandals to hold an audience's attention. Sometimes, you just need a good story about people who really, really care about porridge.
The Golden Spurtle is a delightful, slightly positive surprise that punches well above its culinary weight. It won't radically shift your worldview, but it will absolutely put a smile on your face and leave you with a newfound respect for Scottish breakfast culture. Constantine Costi has crafted a thoroughly enjoyable, heartwarming little film that proves the magic of documentary filmmaking lies not in the subject matter, but in the empathy of the filmmaker.
The Golden Spurtle is the sort of polished but unremarkable film that will find its natural audience on a quiet Sunday afternoon, most likely immediately before breakfast. It does not reinvent the observational documentary, and it was never trying to. What it does is make a case, modestly and with good humour, for paying attention to the small, peculiar things that communities organise their passions around. As Macca notes, the film's virtues lie in Costi's empathy rather than his subject matter, which is perhaps the most useful thing a documentary can demonstrate. In a genre that often mistakes spectacle for substance, a 75-minute film about porridge turns out to have rather more on its mind than the contents of the pot.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-07-13
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Golden Spurtle (2025) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: ITVX Premium
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store
Physical: Amazon US
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