Spanish-language queer epic explores forbidden love during wartime
La Bola Negra
Starring Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González & Penélope Cruz
Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi
Rated R
In select theaters now, streaming on Netflix Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2026
Assuredly a new queer classic, this impressively ambitious drama straddles two centuries with an epic tale of homoerotic love, passion and longing.
It interweaves characters from past and present in a grandiose narrative incorporating magnificent cinematic storytelling and arching historical embellishment, rooted in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s when the fascist right-wing army of Italy’s Benito Mussolini invaded Spain and sparked a revolution.
Carlos (Milo Quifes) is a dashing young man from a wealthy family in Grenada before the war, blackballed (la bola negra) and rejected for his homosexuality when he tries to join an exclusive social club. Should Carlos deny his true self, as his father demands, or live life on his own terms?
A few years later, as the war begins, a village trumpet player named Sebastián (the Spanish singer-songwriter known as Guitarricadelafuente, making an impressive film debut) is conscripted into the invading Italian Nationalist forces. He’s charged with guarding a handsome young prisoner of war (Miguel Bernardeau, playing a character based on the real-life Spanish football player-turned-actor-turned-soldier Rafael Rodriguez Rapún). Both young men feel the force of attraction between them.
And in present day, there’s Alberto (Carlos Gonzàlez), making requests for gay hookups on Grindr while researching queer dissidence in Spanish music when he gets a cryptic phone call from a lawyer representing his late grandfather. His character, too, is based on a real person, Alberto Conejero, the playwright who wrote La Bola Negra along with the film’s two co-directors.
There’s also a horrific local tale about a lynched gay boy and his grieving mother, one that comes full circle at the end of the film. And you’ll learn how everything—the characters, their plotlines and their fates—is connected to a manuscript of an unfinished play by Frederico Garcia Lorca, the real-life poet who became a gay martyr after he was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning the war. In many respects, the film is a “completion” of Lorca’s lost work, existing both within and outside the storyline.
Penèlope Cruz has a dynamite scene in the middle of it all, as a flamboyant cabaret performer who provides the balm of bawdy entertainment for war-weary soldiers…and a message about sexual identity that hits the heart of the movie. Backstage, she tells Sebastián about her dalliance with another performer, a man who posed as a woman. “Transvestitism,” she says, “is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite.”
And yes, that’s Glenn Close as an author with a gay connection of her own, who points Alberto toward solving the mysteries of his past.
La Bola Negra is breathtakingly beautiful, and sometimes even dreamlike, with an aching tenderness that makes its moments of war brutality even more wrenching—especially when one character must do something that breaks his heart…and will probably break yours. And if you’ve ever wanted to see handsome young soldiers frolicking naked, or bathing or pissing, here you go. It’s boldly gay all the way, and it’s already been lauded with praise at film festivals, creating a buzz that might even take it to the Oscars like a small handful of other queer-milestone movies, including Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight, Milk and Philadelphia.
And though much of this homoerotic history story is set nearly a century ago, in a faraway time and place for American audiences, it resonates with heightened potency today, and the idea that even fascism and extreme repression are no match for love—even a transgressive love during wartime, a love that dares not speak its name.
—Neil Pond
