‘The Captive’ review: Alejandro Amenabar tackles formative years of Spanish author Cervantes

Dir/scr: Alejandro Amenabar. Spain/Italy. 2025. 134 minutes.

An impressively bold tackle the formative years and blossoming creativeness of Don Quixote creator Miguel de Cervantes, Alejandro Amenabar’s Spanish and Arabic-language movie The Captive nonetheless feels environment friendly and earnest reasonably than highly effective. The most recent from Chilean-Spanish director Amenabar, whose 2004 drama The Sea Inside received the Academy Award for greatest worldwide characteristic movie, appears weighed down by the accountability of bringing Spain’s best author to dramatic life whereas remaining devoted to the details.  

Weighed down by the accountability of bringing Spain’s best author to dramatic life 

Amenabar’s earlier historic movies, together with 2009’s Agora and 2019’s Whereas at Conflict, felt solidly rooted within the psychological complexity of their respective protagonists, however The Captive, which premiered at Toronto, proceeds from one set piece to a different within the vein of ordinary historic fare – a failure of the very creativeness it goals to have fun. But, given the common attraction of the topic and the movie’s feelgood message, presales have been brisk, together with a Disney pickup for Spain (the place it opens on September 12), and different chosen territories.

The setup is sophisticated however skilfully conveyed. From 1575-1580, younger soldier and budding author Cervantes (Julio Pena Fernandez), affected by a completely injured left arm because the Battle of Lepanto, is imprisoned in Algiers having been captured at sea by Ottoman corsairs. Contained in the jail, with Christian inmates held by Muslim jailors, there’s an environment of everlasting pressure and violence, together with ear amputations and impalements. Freedom from captivity is just attainable in 3 ways: ransom funds to the dreaded governor of Algiers, Hasan (Alessandro Borghi), proven dwelling ostentatiously above the jail; conversion to Islam; or escape, which Cervantes makes an attempt 4 occasions.

Taken underneath his wing by aged priest and fellow author Antonio de Sosa (Miguel Rellan), who’s dedicating his life to recording the occasions unfolding inside the jail, Cervantes falls in with different captives, together with one other priest, the righteous hypocrite Blanco de Paz (Fernando Tejero); Dorador (Luis Callejo), born a Muslim; and others the script spends much less time creating.

Yearly, a few so-called “redeemers”, lanky Fray Juan Gil (Cesar Sarachu) and spherical Fray Anton (Jorge Asin) cross by the jail with ransom cash from the Spanish crown. They’re unable to purchase Cervantes’s freedom however it’s clear that, within the aspiring creator’s teeming creativeness, they’re the prototypes for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who turned his best-known creations (and have been the topic of dozens of movies – not like their creator, who surprisingly has been the main target of only a handful, together with Vincent Sherman’s 1967 biopic Cervantes.)

Partially The Captive is in regards to the energy of the creativeness as a type of escape from brutal actuality. Cervantes finds he is ready to maintain the opposite hardened captives rapt with theatrically-told tales of their imaginary escape, tales which come to the eye of Hasan, a person who’s each horny and psychopathically sadistic. 

Following their first assembly, Hasan permits Cervantes his freedom to discover Algiers till sundown which leads to among the movie’s most visually-arresting scenes, heightened by their distinction to the predominantly prison-based motion. Fastidiously staged for optimum exoticism reasonably than dirty realism, they depict teeming markets and vibrant animals, and a go to by Cervantes to a bustling, backstreet barber’s store, run by Abderraman (Roberto Alamo), that doubles as a den of iniquity.  

As Cervantes captivates Hasan with tales in change for days of freedom, an more and more steamy, Scheherazade-style flirtation unfolds between the pair. Amenabar’s take, together with one scene depicting them bare collectively in a hammam, presents a recent and, to some, provocative perspective on the real-life thriller of why Cervantes was lastly launched from jail in 1580 underneath much less stringent situations than regular. It’s vital that Cervantes comes throughout as charismatic but additionally weak and tortured, and relative unknown Pena Fernandez rises to the problem effectively. 

Inserted into the already busy narrative are a number of subplots (together with one about Christian sympathiser Zoraida, performed by Luna Berroa, within the movie’s solely feminine talking function). Although Amenabar’s script works arduous to marshall the huge quantity of uncooked materials obtainable, the fast shifts of scene and perspective result in a lack of focus and a scarcity of subtlety within the character growth.

It’s clear that Cervantes’ actual ardour will not be for different individuals, however for the tales he tells – his recollections of the windmills of his La Mancha boyhood are elegantly and poetically evoked – whereas the movie’s key relationship between Cervantes and the governor, Amenabar’s one radical twist on the creator’s story, by no means actually takes flight. His Cervantes thus stays considerably generic, by no means fairly escaping the shackles of the common beliefs that the director has loaded him with – the good author as a real citizen of the world, consultant of the creativeness because the place the place social, spiritual and gender variations magically dissolve.