This is not a love story that politely asks for your approval. It’s a prison story where affection is strategy, protection is ownership, and every soft moment comes with sharp edges. In here, “The Prince” isn’t a compliment, it’s a sentence.
The Prince (2019) (aka El Príncipe) opens with a slap you feel in your teeth. Jaime arrives in prison because he killed his best friend during a drunken, furious spiral, and the film refuses to wrap that in comforting excuses. He’s young, handsome, cocky, and emotionally unreadable – which is basically the worst possible combination in a place where beauty is currency and weakness is a blood sport.
Set in Chile in 1970, the San Bernardo prison isn’t just a location. It’s a whole ecosystem with its own laws, ranks, rituals, debts, and invisible borders. Nobody needs to explain the rules because the consequences do all the explaining. The film is grimy, sweaty, cramped, and relentless, but it never feels like it’s being brutal for style points. Every moment has weight, even the silence.
Potro, “protection,” and the real price of attention
Jaime becomes a target almost immediately. And then Potro appears – older, feared, charismatic, the kind of man who doesn’t raise his voice because he doesn’t have to. He offers Jaime protection, and you already know what that means: prison protection always comes with a bill. Their relationship is violent and tender at the same time, possessive but strangely intimate. The film keeps you in that uncomfortable middle zone where you’re constantly asking: is Jaime choosing this, or is he adapting to survive?
The honest answer is usually both. Jaime is smart enough to use what he has, and vulnerable enough to get swallowed by the game he thinks he controls. He wants to be seen. Potro wants to claim. And somewhere in that exchange, something forms that looks like love from far away but smells like danger up close.
How a “Prince” gets made
This film is great at the small things. A jacket thrown over shoulders. A look that lasts a second too long. A sentence that sounds like a joke but lands like a chain. Jaime doesn’t just get a nickname – he gets recast. Inside these walls, nobody cares who you were outside. They care who you are now. “The Prince” becomes a role he wears whether it flatters him or suffocates him.
And once we move into full spoiler territory, the story turns even meaner. The prison isn’t just violence and sex. It’s politics. Every closeness is a signal, every touch is positioning, every private moment becomes public currency. What feels like an intimate relationship instantly becomes a power move that other men read, react to, and punish.
Tango, hunger, and consequences
The tango motif is more than atmosphere. It’s a mirror: desire that hurts, obsession dressed up as fate, longing that sounds romantic until you realize it’s also a trap. The Prince never pretends this is a pure romance. Even at its softest, the camera keeps whispering that this tenderness has a shelf life.
Jaime eventually realizes the cruel joke: he’s protected, sure, but he’s also contained. Potro is both his shield and his border. And when that border shifts, the cost is not poetic. It’s ugly. The film doesn’t hand you a neat moral lesson. It hands you consequences, and they hit hard.
Yes, it can get explicit, but it’s never pornographic. Nothing is there just to shock you. It’s there to show you how intimacy functions in a place designed to crush it. That’s why it lands. You can’t pretend you’re watching something “provocative” without also seeing the sadness underneath.
Why it’s worth your time
The Prince premiered at Venice in 2019 and won the Queer Lion, and honestly, that tracks. This is queer cinema that doesn’t beg for sympathy and doesn’t sell you a fantasy. It just says: this is what it looks like when tenderness is born in a place built to destroy it.
It sticks with you because of Alfredo Castro’s quiet menace, because of the suffocating atmosphere, and because the film understands that “titles” in prison are never glamorous. They’re scars. And Jaime? He’ll annoy you, pull you in, break your heart, and make you angry, sometimes in the same scene. That’s how you know the film is doing its job.
