The Theft of the Caravaggio (2026) [Movie Review]

What is it about The Theft of the Caravaggio that tease my brain? Director Joshua Cassar Gaspar shoots Valletta on gorgeous 35mm and builds a genuine moral trap around a stolen masterpiece, then wanders off into the fog just when you want it to tighten the noose. Sitting on top of the darkest true-crime art history in Europe, it settles for a moody shrug.

Quick Take: The Weighted Verdict

Direct answer: The Theft of the Caravaggio (2026) is a handsome, atmospheric, place-drunk Maltese debut with a killer hook, a cathedral priest tangled in the theft of a priceless painting who is quietly hiding what he really is, that treats its own art-heist premise as a doorway into a slow, melancholy character study rather than a thriller. A deliberate fictional reimagining of a real 1984 heist, shot on lush 35mm in Valletta, it is worth tracking down for the setting, the mood, and the sheer nerve of a first-time director aiming this high. It will frustrate anyone who shows up expecting the caper the title promises.

Who should see it: Art-history obsessives, lovers of slow European mood pieces, anyone who wants to see Valletta shot like a painting, and viewers curious about the small but scrappy Maltese film scene. Who can wait: Heist-movie fans, plot-mechanics people, and anyone with a low tolerance for a story that keeps its cards face down for its own sake.

Rather than crush the film into a single number, here is how the pieces are weighted, ordered by how much each one drives the overall impression. The weight column reflects what actually matters for this particular film, not a universal formula.

Factor	Weight	The Call
Atmosphere & Location	30%	The crown jewel. Valletta on 35mm is worth the ticket by itself, and the film knows it.
Premise & Moral Hook	25%	A genuinely great setup. A cathedral priest tangled in the theft, hiding what he really is, is catnip.
Screenplay & Pacing	20%	The weak flank. The slow-burn reckoning too often mistakes withholding for depth.
Sense of Place & Authenticity	15%	A deliberate trade. Shooting in English for global reach is a defensible call that still costs the film some Maltese texture.
Cast & Direction	10%	Promising and uneven. A committed local ensemble anchored by a weathered, haunted lead.

Bottom line in one sentence: An ambitious, beautiful, frustrating debut that is far more interested in guilt than in the theft that triggers it, and which mostly earns your patience without ever quite rewarding it.

Fast facts for the answer box:

• What it is: A slow-burn Maltese crime drama about a priceless Caravaggio stolen from a Valletta cathedral and the priest custodian pulled into the fallout.
• Who made it: The directorial debut of Maltese filmmaker Joshua Cassar Gaspar, shot on 35mm by cinematographer Dan Cawthorne and produced by Valletta Pictures with backing from Creative Malta.
• Is it a true story? The plot is fiction, but it is a deliberate reimagining of a real event: the 1984 theft of Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing from that very cathedral.
• Where to watch it: Following a 2025 festival run, it is rolling out in North America on digital platforms including Apple TV and Amazon.
• Malta rating: Classified 12A on its home turf.

A Premise Worth Stealing

Let me start with the good news, because the premise of this film is so good you could sell it on a cocktail napkin. A man whose entire job is to guard a priceless masterpiece wakes up one morning to find it gone, vanished on his watch, from a locked cathedral. In an instant he is transformed from trusted keeper to lead suspect, the one person with the access, the opportunity, and no alibi worth the name. Every eye in the city swings toward him. The church leans on him. The police circle. And somewhere out in the tangle, a mysterious stranger keeps appearing, like a splinter working its way toward a nerve.

That is a fantastic engine for a movie, and for a first-time feature director working with what I can only assume was a fraction of a Hollywood budget, choosing that premise and setting it in Valletta is exactly the right kind of ambitious. The Theft of the Caravaggio, the debut of Maltese filmmaker Joshua Cassar Gaspar, wants to be a certain rarefied thing: a European art-house crime drama where the crime is really just a doorway into a haunted man’s soul. When it works, and it does work in stretches, it has the hushed, sun-bleached gravity of a very good short story you might read in a single sitting and think about for a week.

The bad news, and we will get to it in full, is that the film is so committed to being a mood piece that it keeps forgetting it is also a mystery. It has a loaded gun of a setup and spends much of its running time admiring the gun rather than firing it. But before I start poking holes, I want to spend real time on the astonishing true history this movie reimagines, because it is the single richest thing about the whole enterprise, and knowing it makes the film both more resonant and, frankly, a little more disappointing by comparison.

The Real Painting Is a Crime Scene

Here is the detail the movie never quite leans into hard enough, and it is a beauty. The cathedral at the center of this story, St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, is not a set. It is a real place, and it holds two genuine Caravaggios, which makes it one of the most quietly astonishing rooms in Europe.

The crown of the collection is The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted in 1608. It is the largest canvas Caravaggio ever produced, a monster measuring roughly twelve feet tall and seventeen feet across, and it is the only painting he ever signed in his entire career. Better still, and this is the kind of macabre flourish you cannot make up, he signed it in the blood. Down in the dark pool spilling from the Baptist’s half-severed neck, the artist scrawled his name, turning the martyr’s spilled blood into his own signature. A man who refused to sign a single other work chose to autograph a beheading with its victim’s blood. If that image alone does not make you want to book a flight to Malta, we are very different people.

The cathedral’s second Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, brings us to the part of the history that is the film’s actual beating heart. Because on the night of December 29, 1984, three men dressed as maintenance workers walked into that oratory and cut Saint Jerome clean out of its frame. A real Caravaggio, really stolen, from the very cathedral this film uses as its stage. The painting stayed missing for two years while the thieves ran a slow, nerve-shredding ransom negotiation, largely conducted by the country’s then Director of Museums, a priest who found himself playing hostage negotiator for a four-century-old masterpiece. The canvas came home in 1987, damaged and in need of restoration, but home. There was even a documentary made about the whole saga years later. In other words, the premise of The Theft of the Caravaggio is not some far-fetched screenwriter’s fantasy. It happened, in that building, within living memory, and it is the exact event this film sets out to reimagine, which means the truth is not just background to the fiction, it is its source.

I dwell on this because it is not background trivia. It is the film’s actual source. The Theft of the Caravaggio is a deliberate fictional reimagining of that 1984 heist, reshuffling the timeline, inventing its characters, and spinning a new motive out of a real crime, closer in spirit to the way certain filmmakers gleefully rewrite history than to any dutiful reenactment. And the connection runs personal. The seed of the film came from Elektra Anastasi, who plays the investigator Leone and happens to be the director’s wife. Her own grandfather was tied to the case through the Italian Embassy at the time the painting vanished, and she grew up hearing the story told at family Christmases in Rome. That lineage, real crime to family legend to feature film, is genuinely lovely, and it is a big part of why the movie feels heartfelt even when it feels becalmed. The raw material could not be better. What the film does with it is where my reservations begin.

A Fugitive Painted It

If you want the darkness to go all the way down, consider the man who made these paintings, because the cathedral’s greatest treasures were created by someone who would have made a far more dangerous suspect than any character in this film.

Caravaggio did not come to Malta for the weather. He came because he was on the run for murder. In 1606, he killed a man in a brawl in Rome and fled the city with a death sentence hanging over his head, the kind that let any citizen collect a bounty on his skull. He bolted to Naples, then in 1607 to Malta, where he did something genuinely audacious: he talked his way into the Knights of St. John, the warrior-monks who ran the island, becoming a Knight of Obedience. A wanted killer, laundering himself into a holy military order to buy protection and angle for a papal pardon. It is the plot of a crime film, and it actually happened.

For a brief window it worked. He painted the Beheading and the Saint Jerome, he was celebrated, he was safe. Then his temper did what his temper always did. He got into a violent altercation with a higher-ranking knight, was thrown into the cells of Fort St. Angelo, and staged an escape from one of the most fortified positions in the Mediterranean. The Order expelled him in absentia, in the gloriously brutal language of the day, as a rotten and fetid limb. He fled to Sicily, kept running, was attacked and disfigured, and died in 1610, feverish and alone, still chasing the pardon that would have let him go home. The painter of these sacred masterpieces was a fugitive, a jailbreaker, and a corpse-in-waiting. So the cathedral in this movie has been a crime scene twice over: once in 1984, the theft the film actually reimagines, and again nearly four centuries earlier, when its greatest treasures were painted by a wanted killer hiding out in a holy order. The film chases the first crime. It leaves the second one hanging quietly on the wall, which is entirely its right, though a small, mischievous part of me kept wishing it would reach back and touch the older, darker story too.

Wake Up, You’re the Suspect

So how does the actual movie use this incredible inheritance? Cautiously. Maybe too cautiously.

Our man is Orpheus, played by Paul Kissaun, a priest and the custodian of the cathedral, a role that hands the actor the film’s entire emotional load. He is not a clean-handed innocent watching a nightmare unfold. He is a man with a life quietly coming apart at the edges, a sister gravely ill and far away, a corruption festering somewhere inside his own church, and a private history he has spent years sealing off. When the painting vanishes, Orpheus is drawn into the investigation, and the film’s real suspense is not who took the canvas but what, exactly, Orpheus is, and when the truth of it will surface. Into this walks Leone, one half of the police duo that takes charge of the case, played by Elektra Anastasi, and the wary bond that forms between the investigator and the priest becomes the spine the movie actually cares about.

Crucially, the film tells you upfront what kind of movie it wants to be. This is not a caper about how the painting was lifted, nor a procedural about how it gets recovered. The theft is a pretext. The narrative oscillates across time, doling out its revelations in careful increments, because what Gaspar is really chasing is the way the crime pries Orpheus open and forces a slow, and the film clearly hopes devastating, reckoning with everything he has buried. That is a legitimate and even admirable ambition. Some of the best crime films ever made use the mystery as a can opener for a character. The trouble is that a can opener still has to open the can, and this one keeps slipping off the rim.

Valletta in 35mm

Let me be unambiguous about the film’s greatest strength, because it is considerable and it is the main reason to seek this thing out. Gaspar and cinematographer Dan Cawthorne shot The Theft of the Caravaggio on 35mm film, and in an age of flat, weightless digital, that choice pays off in every frame. Valletta is one of the most photogenic cities on earth, a honey-colored fortress of Baroque stone stacked on a peninsula, and the celluloid drinks it in. The light has grain and warmth. The shadows in the cathedral interiors have real depth rather than the muddy digital murk that swallows so many low-budget films whole. Cawthorne has spoken of chasing the poetic quality of motion that only analogue film gives you, taking cues from the tactile, character-forward look of early-2000s cinema, and that intent is visible: there is a tactile, sun-warmed, slightly melancholy beauty to the whole production that flatters both the city and the story’s mournful mood.

The backstory of that look is its own small act of resourcefulness, and worth knowing. The production initially planned to shoot on 16mm before Kodak came through with 35mm stock, then discovered it could not actually afford to light on film the way it wanted to. Rather than surrender, the team leaned into the constraint, manipulating the aesthetic toward a deliberately vintage, roughly 1980s texture that quietly rhymes with the era of the real theft the film reimagines. For a debut shot in roughly three weeks on a shoestring, the sheer visual confidence is the most encouraging thing on offer. Whatever my reservations about the storytelling, this is plainly the work of filmmakers who knew exactly how they wanted the movie to look and had the taste, and the stubbornness, to pull it off. Choosing celluloid for a small independent feature is a statement of intent, and it is one that lands. If Gaspar marries this eye to a tighter script next time, he is going to be worth watching closely. The talent on the visual side is not in question. The screenplay is another matter.

Lost in Non-Translation

Here is my central reservation, and to the film’s credit it is a choice made with open eyes rather than an accident. This is a Maltese film, made by a Maltese director, shot in Malta, telling a story steeped in Maltese history, and it is largely in English.

Gaspar has been candid about why. The recommendation from international distributors was to leverage the island’s bilingualism and shoot in English to widen the film’s global reach, and his own filmmaking philosophy leans that way regardless. By his account, the priority is visual literacy over authentic language, the belief that a film connects with an audience through what it shows more than through the tongue its characters speak. He has made shorts in Maltese, so this is not neglect. It is a considered aesthetic and commercial bet, and I take it seriously.

I just do not fully agree with it. Something real gets traded away in that bargain. The film’s single greatest asset is its Malteseness, that specific, sun-bleached, deeply Catholic, small-island texture you cannot fake and cannot buy, and every time the movie reaches for a more generic, exportable, English-language crime-drama register, it dilutes the one thing that made it unique in the first place. Visual literacy is real, and this film has it in spades. But language is texture too, and a story this rooted in one particular rock in the Mediterranean loses a little of its soul when its people stop sounding like they belong to it. A version told in Maltese, rooted all the way down in the place that produced both the cathedral and the priest, might have been extraordinary. The version we got is handsome and accessible, and just slightly less itself than it could have been. Reasonable people, the director plainly among them, will weigh that trade differently than I do.

Heist or Hush?

Then there is the pacing, which is where the film most tests your goodwill. A slow burn is a perfectly respectable mode. Some of my favorite crime films move at the speed of dread. But there is a difference between a slow burn and a story that is simply becalmed, and The Theft of the Caravaggio drifts across that line more than once.

The problem is that the film treats withholding as if it were the same thing as depth. Information is doled out in careful, deliberate increments, tension is kept at a low simmer, and the narrative keeps circling Orpheus’s buried past with a patience that starts as intrigue and curdles, in the saggier middle stretch, into a mild restlessness. To be fair, this is not a flaw the filmmakers stumbled into blindly. Gaspar himself has acknowledged that the modest budget slows the drama, and the production even brought in a Los Angeles editor to punch up the cut, introducing brisk cross-fade transitions and a period-flavored graphic style to keep things moving. You can feel that effort in the edit. But an editor can only tighten what the script gives him, and the reckoning the film builds toward needs to land like a hammer to justify all that quiet. For me it lands more like a slow exhale. When the film finally shows its hand, the revelations feel less like the payoff the slow burn promised and more like the reason the burn was slow. You find yourself admiring the craft while checking how much time is left, which is never a sign that a mystery has fully done its job. There is a leaner, tenser film buried in here, one that trusts its terrific setup enough to actually let it generate suspense. This is not quite that film.

Art Theft, the Unglamorous Truth

Because AndersonVision readers tend to be the sort who enjoy the reality behind the fiction, allow me a detour into how art theft actually works, since it is both fascinating and instructive about what this film could have mined.

Hollywood has sold us a lie about art thieves. The movies love a slick, tuxedoed mastermind lowering himself through a laser grid to lift a priceless canvas for a shadowy collector. The reality is grubbier and, in its own way, far bleaker. Most stolen masterpieces are not spirited away to some villain’s private gallery. They are taken by ordinary criminals who quickly discover that a world-famous painting is radioactive, impossible to sell, too hot to fence, useful mainly as collateral or leverage. Many simply vanish into limbo, rolled up in an attic or a car trunk, deteriorating in the dark. Consider the most infamous Caravaggio crime of all: his Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, stolen from an oratory in Palermo in 1969 in a theft long linked to the Sicilian mafia. It has never been recovered. Decades of leads, mob-informant testimony, and rumor have produced nothing but a replica hanging where the original should be. The most likely fate of a priceless painting is not a glamorous new home. It is oblivion.

That grim truth is exactly the vein The Theft of the Caravaggio could have tapped, and the film is at its most interesting when it brushes against the sad, compromised reality of what actually happens to stolen beauty and the people caught in its orbit. There is a further irony worth savoring: the real 1984 theft this film reimagines is one of the rare happy endings in the annals of art crime, a stolen Caravaggio actually clawed back through patient negotiation rather than lost to the void. The film could have leaned into that flicker of hope, or into the fatalism of the ones that never come home. When it leans into either, it earns its mournful tone. When it retreats into conventional mystery beats, it forfeits it.

The Ensemble

The performances are solid within the range the film gives them. Paul Kissaun carries Orpheus with a weathered, closed-off heaviness that suits a priest sealed around a secret, and he is a credible center of gravity even when the script keeps him at arm’s length from the audience. Elektra Anastasi has the quieter job as Leone, the investigator whose growing bond with Orpheus is the film’s real engine, and she plays it with a watchful control that does more for the character than the writing sometimes does. The supporting bench, a mix of local Maltese players and a British import in Robert Grose, fills out the world capably, lending the cathedral and the city a lived-in texture even when individual scenes lack snap.

This is not an actors’ problem. It is a material problem. Everyone on screen is committed and credible. They are simply serving a screenplay that too often asks them to be enigmatic when it should be asking them to be gripping. Give this exact cast a script with a tighter spring in it and the results could be genuinely strong.

Should You Hunt It Down?

So where does that leave the verdict. The Theft of the Caravaggio is a film I respect more than I enjoyed, and one I am glad exists even where it disappoints. It is a beautiful, ambitious, seriously intentioned debut that announces a real visual filmmaker and squanders a phenomenal premise on a story too reticent to cash it in. It is the movie equivalent of a gorgeously plated dish that turns out to be undersalted: you can see the skill, you can admire the presentation, and you still leave the table wanting.

For the right viewer, this is an easy recommendation. If you love slow European mood pieces, if you are the kind of person who would happily watch ninety-odd minutes of Valletta glowing on film stock, if the real history I have laid out here quickens your pulse, then this will reward your patience and your curiosity. For the viewer who took the title at its word and came for a heist, temper your expectations hard, because the theft is the least of this film’s concerns. It is now streaming in North America on the major digital platforms, which makes it low-risk to sample, and the setting alone justifies the rental for anyone with a weakness for the Mediterranean and a good camera.

Film Specifications

Detail	Information
Title	The Theft of the Caravaggio
Director	Joshua Cassar Gaspar (feature debut)
Cinematographer	Dan Cawthorne
Production	Valletta Pictures, with backing from Creative Malta
Based On	A fictional reimagining of the 1984 theft of Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing from St. John’s Co-Cathedral
Format	Shot on 35mm film (Kodak stock)
Principal Cast	Paul Kissaun, Elektra Anastasi, Robert Grose, Peter Galea, Stephen Mintoff, Narcy Calamatta
Key Roles	Orpheus (the priest and cathedral custodian), Leone (the investigator)
Setting	Valletta, Malta, centered on St. John’s Co-Cathedral
Language	Primarily English
World Premiere	Mediterrane Film Festival, Malta, 2025 (main competition)
Festival Run	Toronto IFF Industry, Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khaimah, Wyoming IFF, Toronto Lavazza IncluCity
North American Release	Digital and on demand, including Apple TV and Amazon
Malta Classification	12A

A confirmed runtime and North American disc specification were not officially listed at the time of writing. This section will be updated when a physical release is announced.

Looking Ahead to a Physical Release

Now for the part that will interest the collectors, and where I get to be openly wishful. As of this writing, this is a digital-first release, streaming in North America with no announced disc. That is a shame, because if any recent small film is crying out for the boutique physical-media treatment, it is this one.

Think about it. Here is a movie shot on real 35mm, drenched in the Baroque gold of a UNESCO World Heritage city, carrying a genuine art-history pedigree and a wild true-crime backstory that a good disc could unpack in the special features. That is practically a spec sheet for the kind of label that lives to rescue overlooked, beautifully shot international films, restore them properly, and load the release with context. Imagine a proper high-definition or 4K transfer that lets the celluloid grain breathe, paired with a documentary short on the real 1984 cathedral theft and Caravaggio’s blood-signed Beheading. That is a release I would buy sight unseen. Whether the film’s modest profile ever earns that kind of care is an open question, but a movie this visually committed deserves a home better than a compressed streaming file. If a boutique label is reading, the premise practically packages itself. We will publish the full technical teardown and a revised weighted verdict the moment a disc surfaces.

The Verdict

The Theft of the Caravaggio is a frustrating film to review, because almost everything around the story is stronger than the story itself. The setting is sublime. The hook is superb. The 35mm cinematography is the real thing. The true history it reimagines, a blood-signed masterpiece, a fugitive genius, and an actual cathedral heist pulled off within living memory and negotiated back from thieves, is richer and darker than most fiction dares to be. Gaspar has assembled every ingredient for something special and then, in the cooking, kept the heat too low.

What holds it back is a failure of nerve at the level of the script. The film is so determined to be a solemn character study that it neglects the loaded premise that could have made it unmissable, and so eager to travel that it sands off the Maltese specificity that was its birthright. The result is handsome, atmospheric, and slightly hollow, a mood in search of a movie. And yet I would still point the curious toward it, because a flawed film this beautiful and this ambitious, from a first-time director this clearly gifted, is more interesting than a dozen competent nothings. Watch it for the city, the celluloid, and the history. Just do not expect the theft to be the point. In this cathedral, as ever, the real crime is the one hanging quietly on the wall.

The Theft of the Caravaggio is now streaming everywhere