Film Review: La Bola Negra Is An Epic Masterpiece

★★★★☆

La Bola Negra tells the story of three men whose lives are intimately connected through desire, pain and inheritance, across three different eras – 1932, 1937, and 2017.

La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) is an imaginative, narrative triptych about three different gay Spanish men in three very different time periods; a meditation and surrealist exploration drawn from the legend of Federico Garcia-Lorca’s missing play.

The narrative dissects Spain’s and general European history of excluding, denying and erasing Queer history, and the tragedy of having to hide your sexuality from everyone, including yourself, under the threat of torture and death in land ravaged by the horrors of a civil war.

La Bola Negra centres on the life of a young village musician, Sebastián (played by the actor and musician Álvaro Lafuente Calvo), who, after being forced into General Franco’s rebel forces, is seconded into guarding Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau).

An actor, footballer with Atlético Madrid, Rafael is an impossibly handsome, nihilistic and psychologically wounded man. He is also a Republican prisoner who was the last lover of Federico García Lorca, the great poet and playwright who was murdered by the fascists in 1936.

Dying of his wounds, there’s almost a poignancy to his slow and inevitable decay, almost like Rafael is a living embodiment of the misery, of the decline of Spain and the denial of its history during the civil war.

Rafael tasks Sebastian with rescuing Lorca’s last play, La Bola Negra, before Lorca’s work is lost to history in the chaos of Franco’s rise to power. The play – famously only known from its four pages found in the decades after the war – is interwoven throughout Sebastián’s own love story.

La Bola Negra tells the story of three men whose lives are connected across three eras Image supplied

Carlos (Milos Quifes) is a vibrant young man from a high-status family in Granada who, in 1932, applies for membership of the elite private ‘Casino’ but is rejected because of the rumours of his sexuality; blackballed in a torturously elaborate ceremony presided over by the city’s ruling elite of businessmen, politicians and clergymen; both the white and the black balls are rolled down a specially designed chute.

Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi allow that idea to grow and ooze through the interconnection of the narrative, highlighting how political, identity and sexual repression passes from one generation to the next.

The final shutter of the triptych, set in 2017, follows Alberto (Carlos González), a failed playwright doing postgraduate research into queer identities and transgressive themes in the popular music of the 1920s. He receives a strange bequest from his late grandfather, which pushes his already broken relationship with his alcoholic, drug addicted mother, Teresa (played by Lola Dueñas), into uncharted and somewhat unresolved territory.

There is a simplicity, almost banality to the scenes set in 2017. Gone is the hyper-realism; the vibrance and the decaying beauty of the war-ravaged vistas of Spain. Alberto is not as overtly attractive, or a sculptured model like Rafael or Carlos. His life is mundane and suburban rather than the Dionysian, fiery, and nihilistic as the others the narrative is focused on and therein lies the point.

He is a gay man living a normal life, with relationship problems, issues within his family, and self-doubt and insecurity over his failings as a writer. This is in contrast to two men who have to live close to the edge, because no matter what they do, society, their families and both sides of the conflict have othered them.

One of the questions raised in the film is the price of someone finding happiness Image supplied

Penelope Cruz oozes spunk, sensuality and dominates every scene she is in, both in the two dynamic cabaret numbers and also acts as a quasi-mentor for Sebastián, regaling stories of Madrid and the Cabaret and Gay scenes before the war.

Glenn Close anchors the film for Alberto as a kind of mentor-figure as well as pushing the narrative further as a Lorca expert.

At times the third act does drag a little bit, and the emotional pay-off at the end makes up for the excessiveness and the jolt of new characters that have only just appeared after the heart-wrenching conclusion to Rafael’s arc.

One of the questions raised in La Bola Negra is the price of someone finding happiness: what happens to the people around you when you decide to live your true life?

The narrative explores many themes that are sadly still resonant today. What does a nation or culture remember? Who chooses what history is remembered and whose history is denied? Who is allowed to love and who are they allowed to love?

For many LGBTIQA+ people, these questions are horrifically more prescient in the current political landscape than they have been for many years.

Glenn Close anchors the film for Alberto Image supplied

Raül Refree’s score hints at influences of Rossini and even elements of Stravinsky’s Firebird. La Nieve is one of the most beautiful songs in the film, performed and co-written by Refree and lead actor Calvo.

The colour palette and textures of so many frames in the film are more like living, breathing paintings. Several surrealist motifs in the film show the Italian Renaissance painter Caravigo’s work.

Gris Jordana’s cinematography at times seduces and brings you in, and other times horrifies you with the realities of a war-torn landscape and the festering wound that lingers in the atmosphere long after the guns fall silent.

Lorca purists and historians may baulk at the central premise of the film, and Rafael and Sebastián’s relationship, which sets up the conceit of the film.

However, with the looming November election called this week by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, amongst a growing right and far right ascendancy of the People’s Party (PP) and the anti-immigration party Vox, there is genuine concern that a right-wing coalition could easily win 198 seats. Which is well above the 176-seat threshold needed to form a parliamentary majority.

With right-wing governments around the world constantly eroding the rights of LGBTIQA+ people, La Bola Negra feels in some places more like a dire warning than just an engaging masterpiece of Queer cinema.

La Bola Negra opens in cinemas nationally today, Thursday 15 October 2026.

Check your local cinemas for session times.

Website: https://rialtodistribution.com/film/la-bola-negra/

Socials: https://www.instagram.com/labolanegrafilm/