En El Camino (Spanish) [On The Road]

There is a remarkable tenderness at the center of On the Road, even though the film surrounds it with blood, exploitation, drugs and violence. Its love story belongs to two men who meet while trying to survive along the highways of North Mexico: Veneno, a twenty-year-old sex worker who also transports drugs for truckers, and Muneco, an older driver whose life has been divided between the road, alcohol, drugs and a family he rarely sees. The film’s final movement is brutal, but it still leaves behind an unexpected sense of hope. (7.5/10)

Veneno’s journey begins with a financial betrayal. After being cheated, he ends up traveling with Muneco, who agrees to take him along while making clear that he will abandon him if trouble follows. That threat becomes nearly real when Veneno’s stash is discovered. Muneco knows almost immediately that the young man is gay and is quick to insist that he is not, yet he gradually becomes attached to Veneno and accepts his presence as long as the drug business does not attract the cartel’s attention.

Their arrangement grows more complicated as the miles pass. Veneno presses against Muneco’s resistance, and Muneco, worn down by drinking and using drugs, eventually stops fighting the attraction between them. Meanwhile, someone is looking for Veneno. The reason emerges later: he was once kept by a powerful cartel boss along with other young men, and after Veneno failed to appear one time, the man nearly beat him to death. Muneco recognizes something of that suffering, but their fragile bond is thrown into a new crisis when Veneno kills a trucker. With the police now involved, it becomes clear that neither man will escape the consequences unchanged.

The director places this story inside a world rarely represented on screen. Trucking culture is almost never used as the setting for a soft, human queer drama, and the film’s deliberate pace gives the audience time to inhabit that unfamiliar life. At its most basic, it is a road movie: a hitchhiking young man and a hardened trucker move between roadside stops and motels, carrying their histories with them. Gritty realism is repeatedly interrupted by surreal flourishes, while the dusty highways, temporary cantinas and roadside markets provide an atmosphere of striking visual beauty.

Exploitation shapes every part of this landscape. Older men are used up by the trucking life, while younger men sell themselves at rest stops, and Veneno’s youth makes his situation especially painful. The film is explicit, with nudity, several sex scenes and sustained violence, but those elements do not prevent the two leads from becoming emotionally compelling. Their separate demons, and the danger closing around them, create a persistent hope that their connection might survive.

That tenderness reaches its clearest expression when Veneno and Muneco slow dance to a ballad inside a run-down warehouse. It is a genuinely moving moment, made more powerful by everything surrounding it. The film and its actors have been receiving awards on the festival circuit, and both lead performances are tremendous. By the end, the lust, violence and blood have revealed something more vulnerable: a deeply felt love story between two men who find each other in one of the darkest places imaginable.