Albert Serra films a matador in close-up and bets that refusing to judge is the whole point

Albert Serra has made a film about a man who kills for an audience, and the camera never steps back to explain him. Afternoons of Solitude follows the Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey across a single working day, from the hotel room where he is sewn into his suit to the moment, hours later, when the same suit is peeled off a tired body. Between those two acts of dressing, bulls die in close-up, and Serra declines to tell anyone what to make of it.

That refusal is the whole film. Serra strips out everything a documentary normally uses to steer a viewer. There is no narration, no score, no talking heads, no potted history of the tradition or its opponents. What is left is proximity and time. The long lens presses against Roca Rey’s face until concentration starts to look like prayer, then turns to the animal and holds there, well past the point of comfort. The result reads less as an argument about bullfighting than as a test of how long a person can keep looking at one.

Roca Rey is not a character and this is not a performance, yet the choice of whom to film is still an editorial act. Serra picked the biggest active name in the ring rather than a faded one or an anonymous journeyman. That decision binds the film to the practice at its most popular and most defended: the version with full stadiums, real money, and a young star at the centre of it. The man on screen is adored and reviled in roughly equal measure, often by people watching the same afternoon, and Serra puts that contradiction inside a single body and keeps the frame on it.

Serra built his name on patience. His films slow time until ritual turns strange, whether the subject is a dying king attended by his court, colonial functionaries adrift in the Pacific, or libertines moving through a forest at night. He fixes on a body inside a closed world and watches it perform the motions that world demands. Documentary on this scale is new territory for him, but the method is not. He has swapped a staged court for a real arena and an actor for a man in genuine danger, and the patience does the rest.

The look is built from long lenses and tight framing, which collapse the distance between the camera and the kill. Faces fill the screen. The bull arrives in fragments, an eye, a flank, a wound, before the wider geometry of the fight resolves. Sound stays close and unhelpful, all breath and hooves and the muttered cues of the team, with the crowd pushed to a murmur somewhere beyond the edge of the image. Serra is not staging spectacle so much as removing the comfortable middle distance from which spectacle is usually watched.

The structure is the day itself. Dressing is a ritual with many hands, the suit of lights going on like armour, slowly, in near silence. Then the arena, the cuadrilla moving in practised patterns around the animal, the cape work, the long approach, the kill, and finally the body dragged across the sand. Serra treats the corrida as labour as much as display, something rehearsed, repeated and physically punishing, performed by a small crew who do it again the next afternoon in another town. The film keeps returning to the undressing, as if the point were the exhaustion rather than the triumph.

What the film withholds is also what it refuses to settle. By staying inside Roca Rey’s professional bubble, it never asks what the animal’s death means outside the ring, never admits an opposing voice, and offers no reckoning with the ethics it shows in such detail. Audiences have read that silence as rigour or as evasion, and some have walked out to register the difference. Serra plainly wants the discomfort. Wanting discomfort is not the same as having something to say about it, and the film never resolves whether its neutrality is a considered position or a way of dodging one.

Afternoons of Solitude is directed by Albert Serra and runs 126 minutes. It centres on Andrés Roca Rey and members of his cuadrilla, among them Roberto Domínguez, Francisco Manuel “Viruta” Durán, Antonio Chacón and Paco Gómez, all appearing as themselves. The film took the Golden Shell, the top prize at San Sebastián, and has moved through the festival circuit and arthouse release as one of the most argued-over documentaries of its kind.

It reaches South Korean cinemas on June 3, a late stop on a route that has already run through Europe and the Americas, where it landed to the same split between admiration and refusal. Serra hands over the afternoon and keeps the verdict. What a viewer does with it, alone in the dark, is the one part of the film he declined to direct.