THE CAPTIVE
- Colin Fraser
- 18 minutes ago
- 2 min read
THREE STARS Miguel is held for ransom where his storytelling catches the ears (and eyes) of his Moorish captor.
PERIOD DRAMA SPAIN Spanish #ELCAUTIVO Starring Julio Peña, Alessandro Borghi
Alejandro Amenábar's historical drama THE CAPTIVE (EL Cautivo) is all sweeping vistas, immaculate costumes and faces so luminous they look as though they’ve wandered in from a particularly romanticised Renaissance fresco. The casting director clearly knew the assignment; everyone has that wide-eyed, devotional beauty considered mandatory in the grand biblical epics of the 1960s. The result is an engaging, handsome drama that is rarely less than compelling, even if it never entirely settles on what kind of film it wants to be.
The story charts a young, pre-windmill Miguel de Cervantes during his years of captivity in Algiers. He’s been taken by corsairs and with many others, held for ransom. Not yet the celebrated author he will become, Cervantes is presented as an intelligent survivor whose greatest weapon is neither strength nor courage, but imagination. He soon catches the ear (and eye) of his Moorish captor. As the hardships of imprisonment mount, storytelling becomes a means of escape, comfort and influence. Amenábar cleverly frames the future creator of Don Quixote as a man already discovering the power of narrative (he winks not so slyly by means of a travelling priest and his lumpy, donkey-riding side-kick).
It’s good, and good-looking, fun, more so as the focus shifts toward Cervantes' evolving relationship with his Moorish captor. Drawing upon centuries of speculation and rumour, the film introduces a homo-erotic thread that gives the material a contemporary tension. It's an unexpected element in a film that otherwise resembles the polished pageants of another era, but in taking a cue from similarly sexed-up period dramas this erstwhile prestige pic gets a decidedly modern undercurrent.
That contradiction proves both the film's strength and its weakness. THE CAPTIVE is constantly fascinating, but it often feels caught between intimate character study and historical epic. Compared with literary dramas such as the recent JEAN VALJEAN, the emotional tone here feels surprisingly gentle and rarely cuts as deep as it seems capable of doing.
Amenábar remains a gifted craftsman, but the sharper, more distinctive voice that powered films like THE SEA INSIDE is missing. For all its beauty and intelligence, THE CAPTIVE feels a little distracted by its own grandeur which is not to say this is a disappointment. Far from it, but it’s not quite a triumph either.
EL CAUTIVO screens as part of the Spanish Latin American Film Festival 2026
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