On The Road (En el camino, 2025) ‘Venice Film Festival’ Movie Review: David Pablos whips out a stew of menace and eros

David Pablos’ On The Road (En el camino, 2025) flirts with sex and danger in a heady cocktail. This is a film that sees and props up those visceral experiences as inextricable and is all the more richer and tantalising for it. It’s spiked with characters and their combustible sexuality jostling with what they think should be brushed away. Inevitable tension generates in the push-pull between daring desire and its being swatted away.

When we first meet Veneno (Victor Miguel Prieto), he gives off a sense of having narrowly escaped an extreme situation. A boy whose many secrets slowly spill out and lend volatility to the circumstances, he has no qualms about expressing his desires. He cites a mishap and entreats a middle-aged trucker Muñeco (Osvaldo Sanchez) to give him a ride to Saltillo. Muñeco has his reservations. He doesn’t know anything about Veneno and his intentions, but ultimately cedes on further goading.

As we are plunged through the northern Mexican landscapes, a hot, passionate energy seems to shiver beneath the surfaces, straining to strike in full unabashed glory. This is a film where the heat of desire drives a lot of the subterranean currents in the narrative. It cannot be delinked from what the two characters are going through at any given point. We encounter the swelling waves of the intense connection they feel for the other. Muñeco denies it initially, projecting and insisting on his heterosexuality. Veneno, though, doesn’t stop provoking and inciting and nudging what Muñeco is repressing. He knows and senses the man has desires which he may pretend to cast aside nevertheless they have an exerting force of their own. Veneno tells him matter-of-factly he does like being subject to dominance in his gay sexual pursuits.

A still from On The Road (En el camino, 2025)

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The film builds through the rich exchange of throbbing desire, retreating emotion between the two actors. Together, they scorch the screen, leaving blistering impressions spinning far beyond an ordinary spark. The characters don’t take a long time to grow into each other. They dash into a quick, blooming relationship, jiving and ribbing with each other. There’s humour and repartee, one swiftly learning the other’s rhythms and impulses. Mutually, it seems a relationship that can thrive. Initially, though, it begins in the garb of a trade exchange. Once Muñeco discovers Veneno peddles cocaine, he’s enraged. But the latter lures a share in the profits. The two settle on a deal and go about their discrete ends of the peddling. Tucked into hidden pockets, the selling gains momentum.

But how long can the deeper emotion binding the two be folded away? Sooner or later, it will assert itself, demanding the two gain absolute charge of their real desires. Pablos plays with this in a delicious, fuming reverberation of held-back intimacy. Desire lingers at the edges of the duo’s interactions. At its best, On The Road understands the power of desire, the incapacitating hold it can wield. Even as we may push it under, it will carve out its place.

Slowly, we see the chips in Muñeco’s tightly held heterosexuality fall away, inviting greater possibility that Veneno teases. But the cartel’s presence and intimidation are also not far behind. The film sidelines it while etching out the relationship, yet eventually they emerge from the woodwork. Threat amplifies–a surging, unshakable imposition. It lurks on the precipices of the narrative until it explodes in an absolute, irrevocable vortex. The past cannot be undone and it comes to tear into the intimacy and the future the duo might have culled together. Peril accumulates. Veneno opens up to Muñeco the shape of his crisis much too late. The revelation accrues in layers of unease and terror. Menace looms and streaks into the circumstances girdling the characters. On The Road loses some power in an underlined flashback, leaving us wishing the treatment flashed more innovation and provocation. Suddenly, the atmosphere deflates as the telling turns more expository. The sting Prieto and Sanchez bring drowns out in this muddle, as the film hastens to its climax. Nevertheless, On The Road has an erotic, propulsive dynamism that cuts deep.