The Spanish Prisoner is a characteristic example of American ‘indie’ cinema, irrespective of the fact it has not been perceived as such by either popular or scholarly film criticism. The film's truly unique but, at the same time, stagy aesthetic, in tandem with the filmmaker's stubborn decision to put the mechanics of the plot before verisimilitude and/or psychological motivation, and the presence of a strong genre framework (which, arguably, is more appropriate for mainstream Hollywood cinema) made for a ‘curious’ type of film that, not surprisingly, puzzled film critics. It seems that the film's relatively humble industrial origins and the filmmaker's distinct aesthetic stamp were firmly at odds with the crowd-pleasing subject matter and the concrete conventions of the con game genre within which it operated. After all, despite the success of several genre films like From Dusk Till Dawn, and despite the production of more upmarket films by Miramax and the third wave of the classics divisions, the ‘indie’ sector was still perceived to be about films with offbeat subject matter and gritty visual style, neither of which characterised Mamet's film.

One could go as far as to argue that both subject matter and style in The Spanish Prisoner were ‘wrong’ for an ‘indie’ film. In terms of the former, the mechanics of the elaborate con trick that takes place on several locations (including an exotic island in the Caribbean) are hardly the material of the esoteric or offbeat stories that characterised other key ‘indie’ films in 1997–8, such as The Opposite of Sex, Henry Fool, In the Company of Men, Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998) and Happiness (Solondz, 1998).