Editor’s note: This review was originally published on May 21, 2026 out of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Netflix will open the film in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, October 16, then expand wider before coming to Netflix on Friday, December 2.
While it is technically accurate to say that “La Bola Negra” is a single feature film from Spain’s beloved creative duo, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (collective moniker Los Javis), it feels truer to say that they have made four films and magically contained them within the form of one. It is nearly impossible to grasp the structural effort required to fluidly create one perfectly coherent story using three narratives told across three timelines, each with a distinct visual identity.
Related Stories
“La Bola Negra” comprises a neorealist tale of a closeted young man seeking membership at a casino in 1932, a tragic wartime romance set in 1937, and a lo-fi drama about a historian prompted to investigate all of this in 2017. The fourth element, which serves as the connective tissue for everything, is a timeless poetic expression of love for all the queer storytellers who died before they could truly live.
An unfinished play, “La Bola Negra” by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, is the basis of the themes explored across all timelines. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by right-wing militias amid the rising nationalism that led to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. In an act of fantastical baton-passing, Los Javis collaborate with Lorca’s spirit to finalize this play, infusing it with details, moods and lyricism from his life and work. Choice lines from his poem “Love Sleeps in the Poet’s Breast” serve as a time-collapsing flash of lightning, reanimating lost souls so that they are briefly, vividly here.
In this reimagined “La Bola Negra,” it is 1932 and 20-year-old Carlos (Milo Quifes) is under pressure from his father to be accepted as a member at their local casino. The meaning of La Bola Negra/The Black Ball is immediately explicated as roomful of stern homophobic elders vote on his admission with a white ball, meaning “yes” or a black ball meaning “no.” Perhaps you can guess how this vote goes.
Los Javis, aided by sound editors Alejandro Lopez and Anna Harington, use sound design as part of their seamless editing toolkit. The clack, clack, clack of black balls landing plays over the image of an open-topped medical vehicle carrying bodies in 1937. The basis of this second story is “La Piedra Obscura” by Alberto Conejero (2023), a play that re-imagines history to give a different ending to Lorca’s lover, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, a former Atletico Madrid player who fought and died as a Republican during the 1937 Battle of Santander — the capital of Cantabria (this will be important). Conejero has a screenwriting credit with Los Javis in this queered version of his play.
The 1937 section contains a tortured impossible love story for the ages, while also being the horniest depiction of military life since Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail.” In his first film role, the long-lashed Spanish pop star Guitarricadelafuente plays Sebastián, a young trumpeter whose family is wiped out when Italians bomb his village. Offered the choice between death and Nationalism, he accepts the rifle foisted upon him. When a wounded Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau) is taken as an enemy prisoner in the military hospital, Sebastián’s job is to guard him.
Courageous, principled, tragic, and mind-blowingly hot, Rafael is the platonic ideal of a romantic hero meaning Sebastián, already out of his depth, now also has to deal with an intoxicating crush. His eyes nearly pop out of his head when a nurse tells him to towel off a naked Rafael. The overlapping imagery of sex and violence is never more felt than when Rafael gets so angry that his wound starts bleeding through his bandage.
The real Rafael was described as having a profile like a Greek statue, and Sebastián’s meeting with this flesh-and-blood sculpture is foreshadowed in an extraordinary image from shortly after he loses his family in the bombing. Disoriented and terrified, he runs around until somehow he finds himself crawling up a mound of rubble topped by a fallen statue of Grecian marble. Los Javis express heightened emotions related to love, loss, fear, and regret in compositions that make us pause with the character. Later, in a moment of high anxiety when Rafael is catching a beating, Sebastián will run to the bathroom to play his trumpet (not just a euphemism). Cued by Lorca, Los Javis take poetic license to create magical peaks within a landscape of political realism.
Alberto (Carlos González), the Madrid-based protagonist of the 2017 storyline operates in a more recognizable and grounded sphere. A historian with a particular interest in queer music from 1920s Constantinople, his days are a low-stakes matter of research, casual Grindr user, hanging with his partner Javier (Julio Torres) and handling his explosive mother (Lola Dueñas). The catalyst connecting him to Sebastián, Rafael, Carlos et al. is the news that a grandfather he never met just died and left something especially for him, if only he will travel to Cantabria to collect it. Initially impatient with the whole proposition, Alberto — mirroring the trajectory of Los Javis in making this film — is drawn into a fascinated communion with the history that brought him here.
Each of these three stories is exquisitely crafted on its own individual terms and the triptych becomes dazzling once the subtly seeded internal rhymes begin to set into a cohering fourth underlayer. The screenplay is either perfect or pretty damn close with a refined structure ensuring that every episode on one timeline enhances its neighbors on the others, on both a narrative and thematic level.
Crystalline dialogue sparkles whether it is spoken by a poet, a fascist or Penélope Cruz channeling Drag Queen energy to entertain the Nationalist troops as a Vera Lynn type singer. As the platinum blonde wig-wearing Nene, who comes rolling into a room of roaring soldiers draped sexily on a tank, her sympathies are secretly elsewhere. Sensing something different about Sebastián the moment she sees him amongst her audience, Nene confides in him with lines like, “Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite.”
Wherever possible, without interrupting the movements of the character and narrative arcs, Los Javis enhance the mood with nods to queer joy and the freedom of expressing the only lifeforce that is truly yours. Music, dance, poetry, and even looking point-blank at the one you desire afford the repressed characters moments of release. The tormented Carlos is briefly himself while dancing flamenco. Sebastián and Rafael transcend their doomed romance through lines of poetry. Who could do otherwise when those lines are, you will never know how much i love you for you sleep within me
Los Javis build out this culturally reverant perspective to honor their partnership with Pedro Almodóvar (whose fellow competition title “Bitter Christmas” includes a very funny cameo from them) with a fabulous little gag. Meanwhile, Glenn Close shows up in 2017 to play American academic Isabelle Durand, who has dedicated her life to Lorca research and is publishing a volume named “Federica el Poeto Gay.” The gratification of experiencing all the narrative threads coming together is only eclipsed by an awe at the underlying emotional continuity.
All these moving parts are positioned to play like one unbroken piece of music. By the final crescendo, time feels like an illusion and the stories of our dead belong to today.
Grade: A
“La Bola Negra” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.