The new film by Los Javis (the creative team of Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo) grows out of the philosophical seed planted at the end of their celebrated series Veneno: the idea that endings contain multiple futures, all possible and true, however fantastic. Told across three narrative threads and times, their epic film La Bola Negra takes its name from an unfinished play by queer writer and revolutionary Federico García Lorca, who was executed by Francoist forces during the Spanish Civil War before it could be completed. Los Javis imagine the text’s story and afterlives to conjure a rousing celebration of queerness that intimately intertwines past, present, and future.
The centerpiece of the triptych, “Carlos, 1932,” imagines Lorca’s incomplete narrative about the wealthy Carlos (Milo Quifes), and his fallout after being blackballed from his father’s casino because of his open flamboyancy. On either side of this plotline are two metafictions. “Alberto, 2017” is a fantasy based on the life of the film’s co-screenwriter, Alberto Conejero. In it, Alberto (Carlos González) has come into possession of Lorca’s missing pages, so he, with the help of historian Isabelle Durand (Glenn Close, speaking Spanish), begins the work of remembering as “a way to avenge death.” The opening narrative, “Sebastián, 1937,” dramatizes Conejero’s own play about Lorca’s legacy, La Piedra Oscura, about a love affair between Sebastián (singer Guitarricadelafuente in his acting debut), a fictitious young soldier forced to fight for the Franco fascists, and Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a real-life footballer and Nationalist soldier with personal connections to Lorca. The three stories blend and weave together, creating a fluid tableau that joyously mixes fantasy with history to say something real and profound about queerness.
While there’s plenty of delicious nudity and same-sex eroticism, Los Javis actively work to tell a story that is queer in form and function as well. Fans of Los Javis and Veneno, in particular, will instantly recognize their aesthetic stamp: fluid visual transitions where past and present blur into one another, and sound cues that echo across time periods. By moving backward and forwards in this way, time becomes out of joint, creating a narrative that projects the past into the present and vice versa. Time itself breaks free from a binary.
Save for one nagging issue that’s been consistent across Los Javis’ other projects. While La Bola Negra always looks at the past through the filter of the present, the past doesn’t actually look or feel the same as the present. Frequent collaborator Roger Bellés has clearly done incredible amounts of research to fill his production design with period details. Still, whether it’s the 1930s or the 2010s, cinematographer Gris Jordana shoots everything through a similar filter, giving the film a distinctly 2020s sheen. In this nu-classical Hollywood style—with its sublimely theatrical blocking and choreographed camera movements—even the dirt is pretty, which is a touch too sanitized and at odds with the film’s political project. The past may no longer be an unknowable foreign country in this reality, but that doesn’t mean that past and present are the same. They are in dialogue with each other, and a variation of filmic textures would have helped them feel different as well.
Yet, the history presented in La Bola Negra is not only radical but also extremely helpful for those living under new and ongoing fascisms. The film is a romance in the sense that it’s about love and lovers, but it’s also a romance in the literary tradition; it’s a quest, a mythic pursuit of a goal. What keeps Los Javis’ approach exciting is that the goal is never attained and the pursuit goes on. “Transvestitism is the fantasy of the possible. War is the opposite,” coos Penelope Cruz as Nené Romero, a beguiling entertainer with painted Edith Piaf eyebrows.
As she says this to the doe-eyed Sebastián, two different meanings of queerness are present. Sebastián is a neophyte; he only understands queerness as same-sex desire, but this comment from a woman who is, by all accounts, not trans or lesbian herself, shifts that perspective. Through her proximity to queer people, Nené has come to understand queerness as a way of thinking about and seeing the world. That part is textbook queer theory. Where Los Javis penetrate further and make something more urgent is by associating queerness with all that’s possible. In La Bola Negra, the creative, the antifascist, and the queer share the same goal of imagining a new future rooted in collective emancipation. The slipstream nature of the film’s storytelling helps us recognize the martyrs and sacrifices of the past and how they’ve shaped the contemporary moment.
In lesser hands, Carlos’ story would be presented as a climax, his individual liberty, his “openness,” as the ultimate goal. But only by discovering an unfinished project from the past does he find meaning in the present and, in turn, the possibility for a better future—not just for himself but for his country. Queerness is a “horizon,” wrote influential Cuban queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz. It defies the pragmatism of the present by looking at the past with ecstasy and toward the future with world-changing imagination. La Bola Negra gives this idea a visual maximalism and gives its audience a methodology of hope that will persist as time dances on.
Director: Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi
Writer: Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi, Alberto Conejero
Starring: Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close
Release Date: October 16, 2026; December 2, 2026 (Netflix)
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