'The Captive': Little meat on the grill in this homoerotic Cervantes fantasy

It's a shame this opportunity was lost to fantasize about a myth made flesh , and that flesh, being the central theme of The Captive , Alejandro Amenábar 's latest historical drama, comes across as prudish and prudish , like a Puritan in a hammock. The film seems ashamed of its own nature, shying away from the opportunities for risk and adventure that present themselves left and right in an attempt to save its life . The director could have opted for a rigorous historicist recreation of the 16th-century Algerian context or for the wild imagination of Ridley Scott's Napoleon . Amenábar preferred to stir up the chronicle with the formula of the Arabian tale, like One Thousand and One Nights , and imagine the figure of a Cervantes who, while trying to save his life with his dreamy speech emulating Scheherazade, is torn between his future public persona —that of the most important author in the Spanish language—and a sexual orientation that is still disputed today. Amenábar's highly stylized proposal - with a perfumed and toothpaste-like image - in which Cervantes presents himself as a fearful brown-eyed ephebe (Julio Peña), could have taken us to a festival of transgressive sensuality , of sweaty skin and tangled legs, but The Captive does not dare to cross to the other side of the muslin.

Spanish historians are fighting tooth and nail over whether or not Cervantes had homosexual relations, whether or not he was accused of sodomy. For some, the mere suggestion responds to a demonic operation against one of the great values ​​of Hispanism. For others, it is an audacity without possible certainty . Fernando Arrabal , author of A Slave Called Cervantes , explained that his apocryphal Cervantes biography, published in 1995 , "is based on a unique document, dated 1569 and discovered in 1820, according to which Miguel de Cervantes was accused of homosexuality when he was 21 years old and condemned by the King of Spain to the amputation of his right hand and a ten-year exile." "At the end of the last century and until the beginning of this one, prejudice often prevented us from viewing Cervantes as an exemplary and heroic man. His ancestry and affection had to be erased, but in the 20th century, the greatest Cervantes scholars acknowledged his Jewish origins and his homosexuality ." That's nothing.

The Captive doesn't aim to be faithful to the biographical facts of a mysterious character of whom there isn't even an accurate portrait, but rather prefers to be carried away by the fabled narrative of what happened during his five years of captivity in Algiers, seminal and fundamental years in the transformation from a man of arms to a man of letters . The film, however, aims to deconstruct a testosterone-fueled era into a History with a capital H, built on the foundations of violence, battles, and manliness.

The film, co-written with the very prolific Alejandro Hernández - Manuel Martín Cuenca's favorite screenwriter and who previously co-wrote Mientras dure la guerra (2019) with Amenábar - begins with the arrival of Miguel de Cervantes, a twenty-something disabled during the Battle of Lepanto, to the Algiers prison after his galley was hijacked by Ottoman corsairs. The camera, clean and precise, follows Cervantes as he enters the city of Algiers, where they are trying to sell him into slavery, with a group of Neapolitan and Castilian soldiers, including the friar Blanco de Paz ( Fernando Tejero ), the soldier Diego Castañeda ( José Manuel Poga ) and the Castilian Elche - renegade of the Christian religion - Dorador ( Luis Callejo ).

Under the rule of Hassan Pasha the Venetian (played by a lecherous Alessandro Borghi ), the Algerians demand ransom for their slaves and, upon finding a letter signed by Don Juan of Austria and the Duke of Sessa, reason that if Cervantes is an important person, they can demand many more gold pieces for him than for any common prisoner, which extends the future writer's captivity by around five years. "I am nobody," the character insists, an ironic remark considering who he would eventually become. During this time, thanks to the figure of Antonio de Sosa ( Miguel Rellán ), a theologian and writer, Cervantes immerses himself in all kinds of literature—even books then banned by the Inquisition, such as Lazarillo de Tormes —and in the literary fervor that livens up his time in prison. In the film, Cervantes also becomes an entertainer for the masses, first reading these books in public and, when they ran out, later inventing his own stories. Amenábar imagines how the figures of the Trinitarian friars charged with paying his ransom could have been a source of inspiration for Sancho and Quixote . Or how the barber's basin became a quixotic helmet.

The most interesting aspect of Amenábar 's work is the way he blurs the lines between reality and fiction , emulating artistic creation itself. While the protagonist-narrator constructs stories that blend fantasy and immediate truth, the narrator-director also involves the viewer in this game of fables and cinematic presents. During his imprisonment, Cervantes attempted several escapes, which are also reflected in the film and are also pieces within this game. However, Amenábar doesn't take full advantage of these ambiguities, discarding them too quickly. The Captive is also a reflection on dissident identities. Many of the characters endure questioning based on their religion or sexual orientation, in an inquisitorial context of betrayals and accusations.

The second part of the film focuses on the relationship between Cervantes and the Pasha, and it's there that the film could have been bolder, more daring, more modern. In 2025, we've already seen how many series aimed at a general audience treat sexuality and nudity casually. It's a little disheartening that the most transgressive aspect of the film is a chaste young love, and that the film continually finds subterfuges in its planning to avoid violating —or exciting—the gaze. "This is Babylon," promises Roberto Álamo 's character, a Castilian living in Algiers, the manager of what today we would call gay saunas, but that Babylon never appears.

There's too much affectation in the film overall: in the words, in the gestures, and in many of the directorial decisions. Nor do the digital landscapes, the overly clean art direction, and the precise camera movements, which widen the distance between the screen and the viewer , help. A "sin" already committed in While the War Lasts, and from which this imaginary portrait of a writer who, nevertheless, violated the canons of his time, doesn't escape.

It's a shame this opportunity was lost to fantasize about a myth made flesh , and that flesh, being the central theme of The Captive , Alejandro Amenábar 's latest historical drama, comes across as prudish and prudish , like a Puritan in a hammock. The film seems ashamed of its own nature, shying away from the opportunities for risk and adventure that present themselves left and right in an attempt to save its life . The director could have opted for a rigorous historicist recreation of the 16th-century Algerian context or for the wild imagination of Ridley Scott's Napoleon . Amenábar preferred to stir up the chronicle with the formula of the Arabian tale, like One Thousand and One Nights , and imagine the figure of a Cervantes who, while trying to save his life with his dreamy speech emulating Scheherazade, is torn between his future public persona —that of the most important author in the Spanish language—and a sexual orientation that is still disputed today. Amenábar's highly stylized proposal - with a perfumed and toothpaste-like image - in which Cervantes presents himself as a fearful brown-eyed ephebe (Julio Peña), could have taken us to a festival of transgressive sensuality , of sweaty skin and tangled legs, but The Captive does not dare to cross to the other side of the muslin.