From Argentinian directors Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale comes The River Train, the slow-moving 76-minute film that follows 9-year-old Milo as he runs away from home to explore the big city of Buenos Aires. A film that I thought would be directly for me, about children discovering the world, ended up being one that dragged on the most, despite its short runtime. Suffering from a lack of narrative drive and a plot that seemed overall to not have any clear goal, Milo’s story is held back by a fundamental lack of anything to peruse, at all.

9-year-old Milo trains in Malambo dance, pushed to his limits by his father to be great. Living in a small remote village in Argentina, he yearns to see Buenos Aires after seeing it in the movies. After running away from home, he board the train to the city, embarking on a new quest and alone for the first time with no one to call his own.

I first of all appreciated the brevity with which the exposition was presented. Within the first scene, we can sense the pressure on the young boy Milo, pushed to be the best by a strict father accepting no excuses. While I don’t think the small amount of information on the family is enough to warrant the rest of the film, the ideas they did choose to present were very clear from the start.

In general, the film has a unique concept, exploring loneliness in the city through the eyes of a child, a story that I thought would be just for me knowing my appreciation for stories for adults told through the eyes of children, like The Florida Project (2017) or Aftersun (2022). But here, there really was nothing to it. Though the exposition is presented succinctly, I never knew enough about the boy to become fully invested. For a story that says the boy yearns for the city because of the films he watches, we only see one small clip of him looking slightly more interested than usual when watching a film that takes place in Buenos Aires.

Similarly, we know very little of Milo’s goals and the overall story’s goals to become invested in the long journey and struggles that Milo will take. The story lacks, at its core, any kind of motivations given to Milo that make us fully believe the journey he is willing to take. While he faces loneliness, since the film failed to give him any goals aside from leaving his family and seeing the city, the rest of the film feels like it passes without any journey we are working our way to completing. This forces the pacing of the film to halt almost immediately, dragging out the runtime as we question what we are working towards alongside Milo.

Even if the film was targeting an Argentinian audience who would better understand the isolation of the villages and the pressure that Malambo dancers face in order to give a strong performance, it is a very isolating story in general, as we are really not given any goal to root for Milo to complete. Once he reaches the city, it seems like his mission is complete, and we are left with another hour of him trying to find his way as we wait for something to happen.

The lack of dialogue in the film is also an aspect that could, theoretically, work well to play with this theme of child loneliness and loneliness in general in the city, if it werent for the fundamental lack of everything else in the film. Even the young actor who plays Milo often lacks a lot of facial expressions and reactions that I would normally come to expect in a film about children discovering the world, that it is hard to ever full feel alligned with him. With this lack of dialogue that works towards the goals of the film, there is also a lack of anything substantial in the plot that pushes us to root for Milo or become invested in his journey, providing nothing as an alternative to this lack of dialogue, turning Milo’s loneliness into a trend of mundanity throughout the film that is never overpowered by anything strong in the story or narrative.

Overall, I was quite let down by The River Train. A film about a young boy discovering the city outside of his village and forced to face his own loneliness, the film lacks any kind of strong plot or characters to capture my attention, leaving a hollow centre in a film that had potential to explore loneliness in the city through the naive eyes of a child.

The River Train was screened at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival. Image courtesy of The PR Factory.