I’ve just finished Albert Serra’s 2024 documentary Afternoons of Solitude, which follows the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. As I’m currently deep into research on various concepts of criticism, the film made me reflect on what the critic is actually asked to do when confronted with such ethically “challenging” subject matter. How does one comment on the form of a film when the content itself involves the prolonged torture and killing of animals? How does one avoid the easy piety of simply condemning bullfighting, while also engaging with the implications of formal presentation? For example, is it possible that cinematic aesthetics could become an alibi for cruelty?

What is striking is that Serra’s approach is not one of pure observational neutrality, even if the film adopts many of the outward signs of observational documentary. There is no explanatory voiceover, no talking-head contextualisation, no argument for or against the tradition. Yet the absence of commentary does not mean the absence of a position. Serra’s camera has an intimacy with the baroque ritualism of bullfighting: the embroidered costume, the dressing room, the devotional gestures, the self-conscious posture of the matador, the choreography of danger and display. With unremitting focus on every aspect of the spectacle, the viewer is enclosed within the carnal dynamics of this death liturgy.

The film turns on the way two kinds of violence are made to play against each other visually and symbolically. When Roca Rey is gored, the moment arrives as a rupture in the controlled theatricality of the arena. Despite its heaving mass, blood dripping from multiple cuts, the bull, with lightning fury, reasserts itself as animal force rather than ritual object, as if suddenly breaking free from the stylised confines of this ridiculous human performance.

Roca Rey is caught, lifted, trampled, and yet returns again and again. This is where the film’s study of masculinity becomes most unsettling. The masochism of the torero is inseparable from the machismo that surrounds him. His willingness to be injured is not incidental to his heroic image; it is part of the structure that produces it.

But Serra never allows this danger to create a false equivalence between man and animal. The bullfight may contain risk for the matador, but it is not a fair fight. The matador can walk away; the bull never does. Its death is agonisingly prolonged. Serra’s decision to remain in (mid)close-up confronts us not with an abstract cultural form but with every agonising second of this theatricalised killing form.

In this use of the close-up, I was reminded of Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) — not because the subjects are equivalent, but because Serra pushes the question of what the viewer’s gaze can reasonably be subjected to. Also, here the spectators are known only through their applause or exclamations.

There are films that make us think not only about what is being shown, but about the ethics of being made to look. Afternoons of Solitude belongs to that category. It is not simply “graphic”; it is structurally confrontational. It asks whether looking steadily at cruelty clarifies its horror, or whether cinema’s capacity to compose and intensify the image risks turning suffering into aesthetic experience.

The repeated scenes inside the people carrier after each fight are crucial to this reading. Serra places the camera front-on, focused directly on the bloodied torero, while his cuadrilla sit around him in the periphery. They discuss the bulls, the crowd, the atmosphere of the arena, and often the snobbery or fickleness of particular audiences. But mainly they praise him. “You’re a beast,” they tell him. “Qué cojones.” The language is almost comically repetitive, a closed circuit of masculine affirmation. Their role is partly practical, partly emotional, partly mythological: they help sustain the image of greatness around the central protagonist.

Yet it is in these scenes that the solitude of the title becomes most complex. Roca Rey is surrounded by men, attended to, dressed, praised, protected, mythologised. And yet he often seems profoundly alone. Indeed, time and again asks for the affirmation, “Was it good?” “Did I have it?” Like an uncertain boy, always seeking his father’s approval.

As someone who is half Spanish, I have some knowledge of the bullfight. I have been to a couple in Valencia, taken by my cousins and uncles. Being in the arena also produces a strange sense of distanced unreality. The spectacle is so ostentatious, so codified, so culturally overdetermined, that part of you watches through a haze of disbelief. The first time I went, I remember feeling as though I could not quite accept that this was legal.

I have long thought that the bullfight is not meant to be translated through the cinematic or televisual image. In the arena, the space itself creates denial. On screen, Serra collapses that denial. The camera does not allow the same escape into scale, atmosphere, or communal absorption. It brings one into this repugnant choreography of suffering.

Many years ago, I read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon to try to get a sense of how bullfighting has historically been defended through language: honour, courage, style, knowledge, death, and grace. Hemingway’s writing is full of taxonomy and admiration; as you might expect, it is an unapologetic bullfight in the elision of violence and beauty,

Serra’s film is concerned with the same themes, but its form neither elevates nor explains. Indeed, it shows how language, ritual and admiration work to make the violence bearable for those inside the culture.

I did find it mesmerising. And because of this, I kept thinking of that familiar debate: can there ever be such a thing as an anti-war film? Or does the ontology of cinema always work to glorify that which is abhorrent? Afternoons of Solitude is not an anti-bullfighting pamphlet, but it is not a romantic defence either. Its power lies in keeping both things in view: the splendour of the ritual and the obscenity on which that splendour depends.

This is where the ethics of film criticism become tricky. A critic cannot simply pretend that formal beauty absolves what is being shown. Nor, however, should criticism reduce itself to moral denunciation, as though the task were merely to announce that bullfighting is cruel and then stop thinking.

Is the task ask what the film does with violence, how it frames suffering, what kind of spectatorship it produces, and whether its beauty sharpens or anaesthetises our response? Yet we can also conceive of the ethical legitimacy in refusal, and there will be many who would not want to subject themselves to these images and sounds.

But criticism has to remain answerable to the discomfort the film creates and look unflinchingly at the wound such a film opens between aesthetic experience and moral revulsion.

[My series of live online sessions focusing on film criticism and analysis starts this Wednesday. Click here for details: dariollinares.substack.…]