‘Strange River’ Venice Review: A Quiet Portrait of Desire in Motion

Dídac’s family has a rather unusual pastime—or perhaps a way of life. Although the film never spells it out explicitly, it seems their vacations are always spent cycling through different parts of Europe, somewhere between sport and tourism, almost always near a river. The family, from Catalonia, is made up of an architect father, an actress mother, and three children: the eldest, Dídac, a 16-year-old teenager; Biel, 14; and the youngest sibling. One of their trips, along the Danube in Germany, provides the framework for Estrany riu, the striking debut feature of Catalan filmmaker Jaume Claret Muxart.

The film’s journey is less geographical than emotional, more inward than outward. Although the family is constantly on the move and the film borrows some of the road movie’s structure, the real turning points are internal—shifts within the characters, especially Dídac. A teenager with a fluid sense of sexuality, in love with a boy whose feelings remain uncertain, the melancholy Dídac seems only half present during the trip, his thoughts wandering elsewhere—a fact not lost on his parents, or on Biel.

As they pedal swiftly along roads, dive into the river, rest, visit architectural landmarks of interest to the father, help rehearse with their mother, and spend the night in tents or modest inns, subtle and unexpected emotional undercurrents begin to surface. These are the kind of barely perceptible movements that only the attentive notice, living in a space between reality and fantasy. Dídac, for instance, sees—or imagines he sees—a boy trailing him, following a similar path, while each family member wrestles with their own, sometimes contradictory, impulses.

Estrany riu is a film in motion, in suspension, flowing with the landscape like the river itself. It feels like a kind of collective coming-of-age, as each character undergoes small but significant changes. Desire is the force driving these shifts, most vividly in Dídac, who in the film’s final stretch embarks on a personal and potentially risky detour. Yet he is not the only one attuned to the intensity of change. As the mother suggests at one point, this may well be the last trip of its kind they will take together as a family.

A film of bicycles, rivers, rain and open skies, Strange River unfolds as both a geographical and narrative drift, arriving near the end at a space where reality and fantasy intertwine, and where the story’s tension risks dissipating. But not entirely, because the real world—or at least the way one perceives it in adolescence—always awaits at the end of the journey, confronting us with our inner turmoil, whether or not it overlaps with the outside.

Beautiful and tinged with melancholy, accompanied by a cinephile soundtrack that nods to nouvelle vague influences, Claret Muxart’s film echoes certain traits of recent Spanish cinema while reworking them from a more personal, intimate perspective, far less concerned with fashionable topics. Estrany riu is a film that dives into the tangled emotions of adolescence, capturing that fragile moment when one begins to separate from the family unit and, with all the risks that implies, sets out on a path of one’s own.