Strange River follows sixteen-year-old Dídac as he cycles along the Danube with his parents and two younger brothers. At first glance, it is essentially a family holiday, but Dídac is already drifting into a private world of his own. An unreturned crush occupies his thoughts, while the same mysterious boy repeatedly appears at different locations along the journey. Sometimes Dídac sees him in the water, sometimes on land, sometimes he seems completely real and sometimes almost like an apparition. Director Jaume Claret Muxart constructs a coming-of-age drama from that uncertainty, one propelled less by plot than by mood, memory and desire.
The filmmaking is immediately unmistakable. Shot on 16mm, Strange River makes the landscape along the Danube feel less like picturesque vacation scenery and more like a fluctuating state of mind. Water, trees, bodies, roads and passing architecture are constantly connected. The camera keeps traveling, yet it is just as willing to linger on a face or a patch of landscape. That suits Dídac, because he too seems suspended between movement and stillness. He wants to understand what is happening to him before he has the language to explain it.
Jan Monter plays that uncertainty with remarkable restraint. Dídac is not a teenager who explains himself in lengthy monologues. Most of what matters happens through his face, hesitation, curiosity and subtle reactions. Francesco Wenz works well as Alexander precisely because the character never becomes completely substantial. He is part potential romance, part projection, part mystery. Whether everything between the two boys literally happens in the way Dídac experiences it is almost beside the point.
The family remains fundamental. Nausicaa Bonnín plays Dídac’s mother Mònica, who undertook the same journey when she was young and carries her own memories of first love along the river. His father Albert is more interested in architecture, while younger brother Biel senses that Dídac is slowly pulling away from him. These incremental shifts make the family believable. Nobody delivers a speech about Dídac growing up, but you can feel the structure around him changing.
That restraint can also become exasperating. Strange River deliberately avoids straightforward explanations, conventional turning points and sometimes even a consistent sense of time. Scenes begin and disappear, images reappear, reality and fantasy flow into each other. Anyone looking for a straightforward romance or a neatly structured teen drama may struggle with it. At moments, the dreamlike atmosphere comes close to dissolving into vagueness.
If you accept its rhythm, though, the film develops a mesmerizing pull. Strange River treats adolescence not as a problem to solve but as a state you have to move through. The connection between nature, family, first love and uncertainty feels unusually authentic. Not every symbolic idea lands perfectly, but the images and sensations remain long after the journey ends, and that lingering sensory impression ultimately matters more than any neat narrative closure ever could. For this evocative, self-assured and idiosyncratic debut, Strange River earns 7.5 out of 10.