Audiences are entitled to be suspicious of critics who start raving about another new silent film in black-and-white, so soon after the Oscar-winning success of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist. Fad? Cinephile affectation? Maybe, but during the fuss over The Artist, the haute cinephile thing to say was that it was all nonsense compared to Aki Kaurismäki's 1999 silent film Juha. All I can say is that there's a flash of pure inspiration, unfakeable and unmistakable, in this extraordinarily enjoyable film, a silent-movie melodrama version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves set in southern Spain in 1910. It feels saturated with pleasure: it is extremely pleasurable to watch, and shows every sign of having been extremely pleasurable to make.

The director is Pablo Berger, who created the downbeat satire Torremolinos 73. He finds new life and heart in the old myth – certainly more than the recent Hollywood retreads – and daringly locates possibilities for both evil and romance in the ranks of the dwarves themselves. Carmen (Macarena García) is the beautiful daughter of Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a once dashingly handsome bullfighter, now a widower and invalid, who is bullied into getting remarried to his suggestively named nurse Encarna, a gaunt schemer played by Maribel Verdú, squeezing every drop of villainy from the part. Berger creates a macabre household and shows how its bizarre conventions and institutionalised cruelty camouflage her own exotic tastes. After this stepmother's bungled murder plan, Carmen is discovered in the wood by a travelling band of bullfighting dwarves, rechristened Snow White and recruited (there are six of them, she brings the troupe up to the magic seven), as they discover her sensational talent for bullfighting. The gladiatorial scenes in the bullring are superbly good, and Berger takes inspiration from Hitchcock, with hints of Rebecca and Psycho, Buñuel, Browning and Almodóvar, and conjures a fascinatingly ambiguous ending: melancholy, eerie and erotic. A film to treasure.