‘The Captive’ Review: Alejandro Amenábar’s Account of Cervantes as a Teller of Tales is Itself a Powerful Lesson in Storytelling [A] TIFF
After Miguel de Cervantes wrote the most famous novel of all time—El Quijote— in the early 1600s, it became so instantly popular that apocryphal sequels sprung up written by others. This incensed Cervantes so much that, ten years later, he wrote his own, official follow-up. That story—now fused together into the first as a single novel—ends with the main character’s death and with Cervantes proclaiming that a skeletal pen was hung upon the knight’s tomb, making any additional stories about Don Quixote spurious and improper.
The gambit worked with respect to Don Quixote, but not Cervantes, as many stories have been told about his life, including a new, compelling movie about a particular episode of Cervantes’ life, The Captive. The new film, by Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar (most famous for City of God and The Others), honors its subject—a masterful bard in his time—by presenting a textbook, compelling narrative that captivates the viewer from start to finish. It remains to be seen, however, whether this biopic will be itself considered apocryphal by the heirs of Cervantes’ legacy, given the episode the story is focused upon.
The setting Algiers in 1575, where a young Cervantes has been transferred as a Moorish prisoner of war. The young man has just suffered a grave wound that has rendered his left arm mostly useless. He survives an untimely execution, provoked after his injury leads a would-be slave buyer to reject him, by brandishing a letter from Phillip II of Spain himself, granting him passage. Believing him to be an important man in the country against whom they are in perpetual war, the Moors imprison Cervantes with other captive members of the nobility, clergymen, and aristocrats, where they are held for ransom.
Amenábar himself wrote the story and screenplay, though he based the concept behind it on accusations brandished against Cervantes at the time by one of his fellow prisoners, a Dominican friar named “Blanco de Paz.” In a series of letters, the friar accuses Cervantes of engaging in “vicious, ugly” things with the Bey of the territory, which Amenábar correctly construes as referring to same-sex acts. Whether the friar’s account is itself accurate, however, is something that has been debated for nearly 500 years, and that is sure to inflame passions particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, where Cervantes has a stature that is greater than Shakespeare in the English-speaking world (the two were contemporaries, and died a few days apart).
But The Captive is about stories borrowing from real life to construct gripping, forceful tales. Whether the accounts of Cervantes’ supposed gay relationship with the Bey of the territory are real or not does not much matter—they make for absorbing cinema.
Cervantes is played by Spanish heartthrob Julio Peña, with boyish good looks, suffering eyes, and determined conviction as a narrator. The principal antagonist is the abjured Italian who has become the Bay of the province and taken the name Hassam, played by another European heartthrob, the Italian actor Alessandro Borghi. Before Cervantes and Hassam can get to the naked frolicking in the Turkish baths, however, and discussing Hassam’s “garcons,” Cervantes must escape a gauntlet of obstacles and menaces.
It is nothing short of impressive that a mostly original story about a well-known figure can be this compelling, but Amenábar cleverly resorts to storytelling 101. There is danger, faith, death, betrayal, narrow escapes, and of course a tragic love story. And, critically, much like in Cervantes’ masterpiece, there is a lot of futility, and a healthy dose of commitment to ideals and doing the right thing.
Cervantes’ hero—Don Quixote—became so beloved because he was as deluded as he was committed to slaying the dragons he saw in those windmills, even though the rest of the world saw futility. Amenábar’s hero—Cervantes—is compelling in The Captive because he subtly displays a significant dosage of all of those traits, in addition to sexiness. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as an aging frail man (apparently taken after a priest he encountered while captive in Algeria, who shows up in the movie). Amenábar writes a similar character, but for the visual age of the 21st Century.
And that “metafiction” aspect of the story persists through the film. Significant portions of the movie consist of Cervantes telling stories to his fellow prisoners, especially stories about escape. And, like Scheherazade herself, he eventually spins tales for the Bey, as well, as if to avoid his own execution. You have seen this trick in films many times before—a voiceover narrator telling you a plan of something that is about to occur and the film’s images playing it for you as if it is already occurring.
In The Captive, however, thanks to pinpoint editing by Carolina Martinez Urbina, Amenábar purposefully blurs the distinction between the stories Cervantes is telling and the reality he is living. The main story he tells focuses on a captive writer in Algeria who falls in love with the court princess, and Amenábar persistently but effectively confuses the viewer from easily realizing which shots correspond to reality and which to fiction. Cervantes the writer would have been so proud.
Amenábar does it all. He wrote the story, directed and produced the film, and even composed the score. This is a passion project with a capital P—he is committed to the art of storytelling and to an homage to the greatest storyteller of all. The passion shines through in the film it engendered.
At its heart, The Captive is interrogating the power of narrative itself—not just in the stories Cervantes tells to survive, but in how history remembers, distorts, or mythologizes its subjects. Amenábar pushes this concept right to the edge—if it were anymore “meta,” it would all collapse on itself like a black hole.
Instead, Amenábar’s direction invites viewers to question where fact ends and fiction begins, echoing Cervantes’ own literary penchant for blurring those boundaries. The result is a layered cinematic experience that both entertains and provokes (and, again, will certainly provoke), encouraging audiences to reconsider the line between historical truth and artistic invention—and whether these mundane distinctions even matter.
Grade: A
This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where The Captive (El Cautivo) had its world premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.
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