Goya's Ghosts

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Or at least, you certainly don't expect them to be quite this tedious. At the outset, Goya's Ghosts sounds promising – lecherous monks, lusty bouts of limb-popping torture, funny red capes – but the result is something of a grand folie, with Forman's overreaching ambition failing to create a unified or even remotely engaging picture of 18th century Spain.

Despite the pedigree of cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (Talk to Her, The Sea Inside) the film's earthy visuals fail to do justice to the subversive grotesquery of Goya's era-defining workmanship. But Goya's Ghosts is no biopic: Skarsgård's swaggering Goya is little more than a spectre at the feast as events surrounding the lives of two of his subjects are played out on the broader canvas of Spain's political turmoil. The always watchable Bardem gives good leer as Brother Lorenzo, the film's real focal character, but he looks uncomfortable in a role that lurches uneasily between Machiavellian roué and liberal firebrand.

The film's dazzling array of accents is its chief debt to Pythonesque absurdity: while the Spanish extras mumble "los rhubarb, los rhubarb" in the background, the multinational leads seem committed to the "ve have vays of making you talk" school of acting, with Bardem in particular appearing to see his vocal performance as a purely symbolic gesture (or possibly a Marvin the Martian impression) before he gets down to the serious business of dubbing himself for the Spanish release. Napoleon, Nelson, and an army of kilt-sporting, bagpipe-wielding Scots all manage to squeeze into the latter half of the film in a team effort to inject some momentum, but the plot, if there ever was one, has long given way to that most unforgivable of cinematic heresies – unmitigated dullness, and not nearly enough thumbscrews. [Laura Smith]