On the Road 2026 Movie Review Trailer Poster

 Winner of the Queer Lion and an award in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section at Venice, this intoxicating and sensual genre piece by Mexican director David Pablos has nothing to do with Kerouac, though it possesses its own wandering spirit.

*On the Road*—an ill-chosen English title, being both generic and overly specific—refers to a highly unique genre project by Mexican writer-director David Pablos; a work that will surprise those who come to see it expecting yet another adaptation of Jack Kerouac—at least in terms of the most obvious connections. 

Director: David Pablos
Writer: David Pablos
Stars: Victor Prieto Simental, Osvaldo Sanchez, Victor Manuel Aguirre

In other respects, however, Pablos’s fifth feature film taps into the great North American narrative tradition of the open road, with all the infinite directions it offers to drifting souls. The film follows a world-weary truck driver and an impetuous gay hitchhiker as they forge a dangerous and increasingly intimate bond along the highways and roadside stops of northern Mexico. In doing so, the film transforms a simple premise into a surprisingly tense emotional landscape, revealing a dark, battered heart beneath a weathered exterior.

Pablos first gained recognition in 2015 with *The Chosen Ones* (*Los elegidos*), a rigorous and stark examination of human trafficking for sexual exploitation. It premiered in the *Un Certain Regard* section at the Cannes Film Festival and triumphed at the Ariel Awards—the most prestigious honors in the Mexican film industry—though its tone, perhaps too bleak, hindered its commercial theatrical run. Meanwhile, his 2020 queer drama *Dance of the 41* (*El baile de los 41*) had its world premiere on Netflix, though it maintained a more modest presence on the festival circuit. With a raw approach tempered by a hard-won warmth—and with Diego Luna among its producers—*On the Road* could make its mark on the international art-house cinema circuit, having already secured two key accolades in Venice: the Best Film award in the Orizzonti section and the Queer Lion for the best LGBTQ-themed film at the festival. Distributors specializing in queer cinema should take particular note of this intense work, which features explicit, frequent, and—frankly—very steamy sex scenes—elements that might deter more conservative buyers.

The film begins *in medias res* with a stark image that defines its confrontational style: a delicate-looking young man in his twenties is shown kneeling, terrified, in the middle of an arid, bleached-white desert—doused in gasoline and on the verge of being set on fire. He is Veneno (Victor Prieto), a drifter who seems to live permanently on the brink of ruin. With no home or family in sight, he scrapes by by providing sexual services to truck drivers at various stops scattered across Mexico’s vast, barren wilderness. It is a neon-lit underworld—comprising roadside diners, cantinas, and sordid sex dens—defined as much by brutal hypermasculinity as by a raw, suppressed queer longing. Thanks to Ximena Amann’s cinematography, which bathes the arid, neon-drenched compositions in a sweaty sheen, the setting becomes so vivid and volatile that it imbues even the most predictable plot twists with an unsettling sense of uncertainty. Although Veneno may prove useful to solitary, undemanding truck drivers seeking fleeting companionship, he remains an outsider in their world—vulnerable to both violence and exploitation. After being swindled and left to fend for himself by one of his clients, he receives help from Muñeco (Osvaldo Sanchez), a truck driver somewhat kinder than most of his peers. A middle-aged man—ostensibly heterosexual, with a wife and children he rarely sees—Muñeco has no issue with the young man’s sexuality or lifestyle. In fact, as they spend more time together, it becomes clear that these aspects not only fail to bother him, but are, in fact, entirely acceptable to him.

An attraction develops between the two, one that is palpable yet fraught with thorny ambiguities. Does Veneno see a father figure in Muñeco—a "father" in the *queer* sense of the term—or simply an easy mark with access to money and drugs? This uncertainty becomes a constant source of tension, as does Muñeco’s internal struggle with his own emotions, his heterosexual, patriarchal identity drifting further and further away from his current reality. And that is to say nothing of the other *neo-noir* complications that emerge within Pablos’s concise, taut screenplay: armed ghosts from Veneno’s past, and the long arm of the law, which begins to close in following an impulsive, fatal altercation at a truck stop. 

Sánchez’s performance—expressively restrained—is built upon this contrast, serving as a solid, stoic counterpoint to Prieto’s more restless and reckless screen presence. Their unpredictable chemistry—a dynamic of attraction and repulsion, articulated not just through suggestion but through their on-screen sexual encounters—acts as the film’s primary engine, propelling it past the clichés of the crime genre that might otherwise fail to stir any real emotion. *On the Road* is, unusually, both visceral—driven by raw, hormonal energy—and "hard-boiled"; it is a hot-blooded work that nonetheless retains an absolutely cold-blooded core.

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