![‘The Captive’ Review: Homoeroticism & Storytelling Whimsy Illuminate Alejandro Amenábar’s Cervantes Biopic [TIFF]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/11125228/The-Captive_Still_04.jpg "‘The Captive’ Review: Homoeroticism & Storytelling Whimsy Illuminate Alejandro Amenábar’s Cervantes Biopic [TIFF]")
“Don Quixote” (1605) is widely regarded as a pioneering candidate for the first modern novel and is often considered among the greatest works in literary history. Surprisingly, the Spanish author Miguel De Cervantes has rarely been the subject of movies or TV shows. Shakespeare has been portrayed in dozens of movies, including this year’s Hamnet. Spanish auteur Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others,” “The Sea Inside”) corrects this shortcoming by mounting, by some measure, Cervantes’s most notable screen portrayal. “The Captive” is no hagiography of a national hero. Instead, much like the author, Amenábar fancifully reimagines his life under the captivity of Hasan Pasha, Bey of Algiers, portraying Cervantes as a closeted gay man who begins a sexual relationship with his captor. It is a humanizing and ingenious portrayal, freed from the bounds of undying fealty to historical accuracy.
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“The Captive” is a movie about a famous person, made for the right reasons—here is an interesting story worth telling. It runs contrary to the vulgar Hollywood trope of making a movie about every renowned person imaginable, just because they are famous. Amenábar also mercifully eschews the decade-spanning Wikipedia entry template to focus on a very particular sliver of Cervantes’ life—his slavery and detainment in Algiers as a political prisoner held for ransom. “The Captive” is thus a contained, single-location prison movie, taking place in the courtyard of the Bey’s palace. It begins with Cervantes’ arrival and concludes with his departure 5 years later.
Another lurid specialty of Hollywood artist portrayals is showing single events that inspire particular details of their art—a series of lightbulbs going off—think Tolkien (2019) seeing the Nazgul on the World War I battlefield. It is reductive to art and leads audiences to believe, ‘Oh, that is how she/he came up with that.’ Instead, Cervantes is portrayed in his youth, decades before he wrote Don Quixote. It is known that he was captured at sea by corsairs after many military exercises and planned several jail breaks with his fellow men. Dramatizing these details gives “The Captive” a Dumas-esque adventure quality. Relying on two historical pieces of information, Cervantes’ banishment from Madrid for “evil acts,” and his favor with the Bey even after escape attempts, Amenábar turns “The Captive” into a gay melodrama. The implication is that his Madrid banishment was due to “sodomy” and his Algiers survival was due to “sexual favors.”
The principal players in this gay melodrama are Cervantes (Julio Peña), closeted priest Blanco de Paz (Fernando Tejero), writer Sosa (Miguel Rellán), and gardener Dorador (Luis Callejo) – fellow prisoners all. Peacocking over all is Hasan Pasha (Alessandro Borghi), the flamboyant tyrant who has a harem of young men whom he fucks for pleasure. Amenábar loads “The Captive” with intense homoerotic imagery and innuendo. 16th-century Islamic Algiers is shown to be more gay friendly than modern-day San Francisco, with cross-dressing Muslim boys and smooching Muslim men at every street corner. The captured Christian Spaniards get in on the action, too, as it is soon revealed that either many of them have already tried gay sex or want to.
In a welcome move, Amenábar also breaks from the artist biopic format by actually showing Cervantes honing the art he is known for—storytelling. Cervantes starts inventing tales to pass the time for his fellow prisoners. The Bey overhearing from his palace soon sanctions Cervantes for private storytelling sessions, turning him into a male Christian Scheherazade as he spins tales to win mercy and small privileges for himself and fellow prisoners. “The Captive” becomes heady as it cuts back and forth from real events to Cervantes’ narrated stories, purposefully blurring the lines. It also turns steamy as Pasha’s seduction of Cervantes has Peña and Borghi often naked together—getting massages or baths—having intense conversations. However, graphic nudity is kept off-screen.
Some of the constraints of the setting hold “The Captive” back. Amenábar structures his story like a serial, with episode after episode finding Cervantes on the brink of death. Only we know he hasn’t written Don Quixote yet, so expect him to survive. Cervantes’s principal narrated tale, cut throughout “The Captive,” features a Muslim princess looking to escape Algiers. It was likely included to have a single female character or even just a woman on-screen; otherwise, “The Captive” is populated entirely with European and Islamic men, much like “Lawrence of Arabia.” Only the men in “The Captive” are all horny and often fucking each other or others. Language constraints, too, become evident when portraying the past, as words available today couldn’t be comprehended then, and history and language have moved on in different directions. Thus, in spoken dialog, the North African Muslims are called ‘Moors’, gay sex is referred to as ‘sodomy’ and gay men are called ‘queer’.
Peña is a handsome presence and ably conveys Cervantes’ gentle heroism and storytelling talent. Borghi, meanwhile, is as volcanic as Cervantes’ tormentor-cum-lover. Borghi recently played porn god Rocco Siffredi in Netflix’s “Supersex” and brings some of that same floridness, smarm and joie de vivre to this performance, along with beguiling menace and cruelty. He makes the picture as his presence creates a grounded villain for the good guys to strive against. Borghi deepens Bey, and you can see him falling for Cervantes, even as he tortures him. Their relationship is a toxic inferno of lust.
Amenábar, going back to “Agora” (2009), has always excelled at recreating the historical past. The rendering of the 1570s Algiers is beautiful and detailed. The single setting of palace grounds and bazaar means resources aren’t stretched too thin, and “The Captive” looks handsome. The music is suitable, though one montage is overlaid with a Tollywood-style ditty of all things.
Audiences looking for scenes that dramatize how specific scenes in “Don Quixote” were written might be left wanting. But for everyone else, not given to sacriligious outrage at seeing their heroes portrayed with creative freedom, “The Captive” might offer an insightful view into the psyche of the man who became one of our greatest storytellers. Here is a rare famous person story that would be worth telling even if the protagonist weren’t famous. [B+]
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