Strange River

Strange River is a rare gift of a film. This might be the closest cinema has come to approximating the unique headrush of queer teenage discovery. In his feature debut, Catalan writer-director Jaume Claret Muxart goes spare on dialogue and evokes patterns of thought, imaginative vision and tender melancholy. There’s a deep fragility so central to puberty which the director has precisely gauged. It’s that phase when feelings and fancies can shape up to be seismic. Everything feels bottomless, churning. The film maps this intensity against a drifting slipstream of recognition, denial and growth. Pain is inescapable as the callow heart seeks to scamper away and forge its own detour. Strange River builds an emotional, internal space by its own dream logic and lures you in without presupposing cues or needless connective filaments. Here’s a filmmaker inviting you to be one with his work’s peculiar, subliminal impulses even while it constantly evades a firm grasp.