Afternoons of Solitutde      Director: Albert Serra Cert: NoneGenre: DocumentaryStarring: Andrés Roca ReyRunning Time: 2 hrs 5 minsObsession and Backrooms are currently, and rightly, top of the pops, but Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude may be the most unsettling horror film of the year. This bullfighting documentary opens with an indelible, soulful stare. A bull crams the frame, gazing directly into the camera. Its black head is beautifully sculptural, its eyes alert, inscrutable and wounded.The animal should not know it is about to die, yet it seems to sense it. Two hours later, after repeated sequences of ritualised slaughter and bloodletting, that stare haunts every scene.Serra has an uncanny ability to reinvent some of cinema’s most familiar subjects. The Death of Louis XIV was a slow spectacle of bodily decay; colonial uncertainty became the trippy Pacifiction.Afternoons of Solitude contains neither narration nor commentary. That neutrality is precisely what makes it such a powerful condemnation of bullfighting. Rather than editorialise, Serra simply refuses to look away. The result is a film that exposes the unsporting violence underpinning the spectacle with a clarity no polemic could match.Following the celebrated Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey through a succession of fights, the documentary alternates between the arena, luxury hotel rooms and chauffeured journeys accompanied by a coterie of devoted male lickspittles. These attendants and random fans repeatedly reference the matador’s “big balls”.Roca Rey remains largely unknowable: silent, dull, often depicted in the back of a car, and curiously passive outside the ring. If anything, Serra treats him as another object within the pageantry. Assistants dress him like a paper doll; acolytes praise his courage with such absurd extravagance that their hero worship borders on grotesque parody.There’s undeniable visual splendour here. Artur Tort’s camera captures the ornate costumes and ceremonial choreography with disturbing precision. Paradoxically, Serra repeatedly strips away the distractions that aestheticise bullfighting. The arena becomes a claustrophobic chamber in which animal abuse cannot be outsourced to collective merriment.[ Bullfighting documentary leaves controversy behind to unite criticsOpens in new window ]Stripped of the bells, the whistles and the cheering crowds, what remains is impossible to romanticise: an exhausted, tortured animal, a man performing hypermasculinity to the point of self-annihilation, and inexcusable barbarism.On Mubi from Friday, June 5th