‘Strange River’ review: A teenage boy encounters hidden desires on a trip along the Danube

Dir. Jaume Claret Muxart. Spain/Germany. 2025. 106mins

Summer holiday stories have always been a reliable subset of the coming-of-age drama, with all the narrative and thematic possibilities they bring: young people breaking away from parental discipline, discovering their burgeoning sexuality in settings that are unfamiliar, even dangerous territory for the adolescent self. Such films can certainly be formulaic, but Catalan debut writer-director Jaume Claret Muxart shows a canny awareness of the tropes, giving them a fresh, sensitive working-over in his debut feature Strange River.

Sustains its mood of mystery and suggestion

Tender, enigmatic and gorgeously shot on 16mm, this story of a teenage boy’s journey of discovery is set against a family cycling trip along the Danube (previously the setting of Claret Muxart’s 2023 short Die Donau). Mixing sensuality and lyrical atmospherics with an unapologetically highbrow frame of reference (German Romantic drama, modernist architecture), this elegantly confident offering should attract strong art-house interest, not least among LGBTQ+ outlets, following its Venice Horizons bow.

The film begins with five holidaymakers cycling through woodland, foliage flickering hypnotically before our eyes. They are a Catalan family: actress Monika (Nausicaa Bonnín), architect Albert (Jordi Oriol), 16-year-son Dídac (Jan Monter) and his younger brothers Biel (Bernat Solé) and Guiu (Roc Colell). The setting is the landscape along the Danube – although teasingly, the film doesn’t tell us specifically where we are till relatively late in the action. For much of the time, we watch the family on the move, laughing or bickering among themselves. Notably, we see Dídac reacting testily to his brothers, or moodily withdrawing; perhaps he’s only too aware that, as Monika tells him, this might be the family’s last holiday as a complete unit. 

There are several stop-offs en route, one at a campsite where Dídac becomes aware that much cruising takes place after nightfall – but not only, as he appears to witness, among gay men. Later, the family visit the School of Design in Ulm, where Albert enthuses earnestly about the architecture; and later, another modernist site, a sort of miniature garden where Monika meets a German actress who lives there, the two women bonding over the play The Death of Empedocles, by the Romantic poet Hölderlin, in which Monika is due to appear.

Dídac’s journey is haunted all along by an enigmatic figure: a young man (Francesco Wenz) first glimpsed swimming naked underwater, like a present-day incarnation of Germany’s mythical river sprites. The man turns up later, eerily glimpsed in wooded darkness, or wandering through the cavernous light-filled spaces of the School of Design, largely deserted over the summer. Is he real, or a creation of Dídac’s burgeoning libido? Is he perhaps a displaced version of the boy that Dídac desires back home ? The mystery figure eventually emerges into the foreground in an extended sequence that, again, may be real or the fruit of Dídac’s fantasy – echoing, possibly inspired by, Monika’s own memories of young love and escape.

Throughout, Strange River sustains its mood of mystery and suggestion, the bracingly natural interplay between the actors – especially the briskly unruly young brothers – sharply evokes the tensions, resentments and tendernesses between the family members; especially as they relate to the taciturn Dídac, who is played in a bold, magnetic debut by brooding newcomer Monter. 

Pablo Paloma’s camerawork is by turns kinetic and calmly contemplative, as well as densely textured, whether exploring architecture or the feel of land and foliage. The colour palette alternates between smoky, autumnal blues and purples and intense summer greens – with especially sensual attention given to water and skin. The sound design makes rich play on voices, silence and natural sounds, with music also used imaginatively, right from the opening euphoric burst of Penguin Café Orchestra – although Claret Muxart is surely playing knowingly with an element of kitsch when a masturbation scene climaxes with a vigorous surge of Ravel’s ‘Daphnis and Chloé’.