“Captive” does feel like a labor of love for its writer-director, its conviction carrying us along on a smooth overall ride, even if the individual ingredients fail to entirely coalesce.

A polished and ambitious historical drama that finds poetry in imagination as survival, but plays it a bit too safe. Elegant, provocative at times, yet oddly restrained for a film about the birth of literary madness.

There is still something delightfully subversive about it all, even if it’s simply a metaphorical middle finger to so-called tradition.

Along with Julio Peña, it is Alessandro Borghi’s performance that helps give this engaging biographical drama both its soul and simmering erotic charge