Strange River

At first glance, Jaume Claret Muxart’s Strange River has the makings of a familiar coming-of-age story: a teenage boy, a summer journey, and an ill-fated encounter. Yet for all its gestures toward such narratives, it quietly sidesteps the usual crescendos and reckonings. Instead, this is a drifting, quietly haunting film – part travelogue, part ghost story – that finds its meaning in what’s left unsaid.

The movie follows Dídac (Jan Monter), who embarks on a cycling trip along the Danube with his parents and two younger brothers. The journey is rendered with grounded, almost domestic realism: camping in the rain, navigating narrow trails, and arguing over hot water in a cramped hostel room. But as the kilometres slip by, Dídac becomes increasingly preoccupied with Alexander (Francesco Wenz), a silent, enigmatic figure who appears and disappears along the river, always alone, always slightly out of sync with the world.

A remarkable amount of detail is included without crowding the feature and its brief runtime. Shot on 16mm, the film leans into a soft, overlit texture that feels just removed from the present. Nature isn’t a backdrop here – it’s a constant presence, as watchful as it is indifferent. In one of the most striking moments, Dídac lies in a field, gradually blurring into the grass as the frame lets him fade into the landscape. It’s not quite magical realism, but it gently distorts time and memory, creating a sense of subtle disorientation. Dídac’s parents are unusually multi-dimensional; their inner lives emerge through quiet asides: the father (Jordi Oriol) passionately rhapsodising about Max Bill’s functionalist architecture at the Ulm School of Design, while the mother (Nausicaa Bonnín) reflects wistfully on her unfulfilled acting career.

Muxart blends genres and tones but deliberately omits any exploration of repression or crisis. Dídac’s queerness is never questioned, never punished, never even explicitly named. The world of Strange River is carefully pared back, almost emptied out – no wider society, no observers, save for Dídac’s 14-year-old brother Biel, who trails behind throughout the film, close enough to catch a glimpse, too distant to bear witness. Alexander, portrayed by Wenz with an angelic, almost otherworldly stillness, seems to hover just beyond reality. The feature never pushes this ambiguity toward resolution, refusing to pin Alexander down as a ghost, vision or metaphor. In the end, Strange River doesn’t seek answers. Instead, it drifts, lingers and listens – revealing itself through quiet restraint.

Christina Yang

Strange River does not have a release date yet.

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