Strange River

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

STRANGE RIVER   ***1/2

Jaume Claret Muxart

2025

IDEA:  On a summer trip with his family in Germany, the teenaged Dídac is drawn to a mysterious boy he encounters in the water.

BLURB:  Jan Monter, the young lead actor of Strange River, has the perfect face for such a cryptic and bewitching film. With his sphinx-like mien and wide azure eyes that are less like windows than frosted glass, he entrances the camera with an alluring unknowability. It is the unknowability of a teenager to his parents, but also maybe to himself, to desires and fears that have yet to autonomously crystallize outside the safety of the family unit. For Jan Monter’s Dídac, still waters run deep, and for Jaume Claret Muxart, in his feature directorial debut, bodies of water carry timeworn connotations of life, death, eroticism, and irrationality. While hardly reinventing the tropes of the summer coming-of-age tale, Strange River captivates from its shimmeringly sensual surface to the hints of its quivering undercurrents. Pablo Paloma’s 16 mm cinematography is a thing of immaculate jewel-like beauty, radiant with estival greens and blues and lightly sunburned skin. In becalmed long takes, landscapes and bodies are rendered with tactile presence, as in the engulfing depths of the river or the goose-bumpy flesh of a boy swimming right up against the camera. At the same time, Strange River is an abstraction, an otherworldly dance of moonlit ripples and twink(ly) apparitions taking place in a liminal zone. Muxart gives us just enough narrative shading to make sense of the sullen Dídac, prone to sudden breakdowns, and to grasp the precarious balance of his family, his relationship toward parents and especially brothers from whom he’s awkwardly growing apart. But the tender, laconic Strange River’s primary language is visual and corporeal, expressing itself in glances and breaths and a prominent hickey, still ruddy and fresh.