On the Road (En el camino)

😁 On the Road (En el camino), dir.David Pablos, 2025, Mexico, 93 min., in Spanish with subtitles
Thursday, June 25, 2026, 8:30 PM, Vogue
Coming soon to Strand Releasing
⚠️🔞 violence, drug use, sexually explicit content

On the Road (En el camino)

Frameline blurb: When young gay drifter Veneno hitches a ride with lonesome, stoic trucker Muñeco, an unexpected, carnal bond emerges between the two along the dusty, desolate highways of northern Mexico. But the deeper they get into the dangerous, drug-fueled, hyper-masculine world of long-haul truckers, the greater the threat of their troubled pasts catching up with them becomes.

Sexually audacious and unapologetically brutal, On the Road deservedly won both the Queer Lion and the Horizons top prize at the Venice Film Festival this past fall. For his fifth feature film (and his second produced by Diego Luna), writer/director David Pablos (Dance of the 41) pairs professional actor and theatre veteran Osvaldo Sanchez (Pedro Páramo) opposite alluring newcomer Victor Prieto, making his acting debut here, with dazzling results. With their emotional urgency and boiling-hot chemistry, Sanchez and Prieto shared the Best Actor prize at the Morelia International Film Festival, which celebrates the best in Mexican cinema.

My take: First of all, a little bit of Spanish: muñeco means doll and veneno means venom. We meet Veneno when he is looking for a ride, any ride, to run away from something horrible that we see only in fragmentary glimpses. He tags along with Muñeco, who seems glad for the company and is willing not to ask too many questions. Together, they drive along the desert highways of northern Mexico, sparsely traveled at any hour of the day, but all the moreso in the wee hours of the morning, stopping at roadhouses along the way for a meal and perhaps a shower. We find out more about Muñeco and how he arrived at this point, but as to Veneno we still see only glimpses of the trouble that seems determined to follow him. There are moments of tenderness and vulnerability, but neither man is able to fully absorb those moments.

From the outset, the story has a heavy shadow hanging over it, set in a bleak landscape of little more than dust, sun, and distant mountains, carved only by a two-lane stripe of highway. But the characters slowly open up to one another and to us, leading us to hope that somehow they find their way to happier circumstances. I wouldn’t recommend their method of travel, by any means, but from the safety of a seat in the audience, it’s a ride worth taking. Highly recommended.

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