Like many great filmmakers deep into their careers, Pedro Almodóvar is sometimes accused of making the same film over and over again — a reductive criticism that's nonetheless worth unpacking.
It's true that Almodóvar's films are invariably full of strong women and sensitive men, photographed in scenes where wardrobe and décor are always perfectly color-coordinated. There's a backsplash tile pattern in his 2021 masterpiece, Parallel Mothers, that's stuck with me more than some movies.
It's also true that Almodóvar increasingly straddles the gap between melodrama and meta-drama. In films like Bad Education, Volver and especially Pain and Glory, he's drawn on details from his personal history and playfully explored the ways that art imitates life and vice versa.
Almodóvar's splendid new movie, Bitter Christmas, continues in this vein by telling a story within a story. It begins in Madrid, in the winter of 2004. A director named Elsa, played by Bárbara Lennie, is experiencing severe panic attacks and migraines. She's well taken care of by her loving boyfriend, Bonifacio, played by Patrick Criado, who drives her to the ER and, on another occasion, to the home of a rich friend who has some high-grade painkillers.
Bonifacio is a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper on weekends; we get a sexy flashback to the bachelorette party where he and Elsa first met. Hilariously, Elsa's first move wasn't to ask him out, but to ask if he was interested in starring in an underwear commercial she was directing.
Before long, the movie pulls back the curtain: Elsa is a character in a screenplay that's being written in 2026 by Raúl, a veteran film director who's played by Leonardo Sbaraglia. Elsa is a fictional stand-in for Raúl, who is himself a fictional stand-in for Almodóvar.
Bitter Christmas cuts absorbingly between these two stories and time frames, and invite us to puzzle over their similarities and differences. Like Elsa, Raúl has suffered anxiety attacks and migraines, and Almodóvar has spoken in interviews about dealing with the same medical issues. Also like Elsa, Raúl has an enormously supportive boyfriend, named Santi, whom he sometimes takes for granted.
There's another important character here, too: Raúl's longtime assistant Mónica, who's played by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón. Mónica is Raúl's closest confidante, which, as we'll find out in due course, makes her also potentially his most dangerous enemy.
The two stories unfold with such fluidity that you can almost forget which one is fiction and which one is fiction-within-a-fiction. Sometimes, Almodóvar seems to be saying, a work of art can be so vibrant and larger-than-life that it outshines its source of inspiration.
And sometimes, too, art can be so powerful that it changes the course of our lives entirely. In one scene, Elsa hangs out with her friend Patricia, played by a fiery Victoria Luengo, who's just found out that her husband is cheating on her. Patricia plays Chavela Vargas' recording of the classic song "Bitter Christmas," and its bleak mood of holiday heartbreak inspires her to make a momentous decision about her marriage.
A new conflict arises when Elsa decides to use Patricia's marital crisis as a plot point in a screenplay that she's writing, infuriating her friend. In a symmetrical twist, Raúl finds himself in much the same predicament, when he's accused of exploiting someone's personal tragedy for his own artistic gain.
The ethical implications of turning other people's lives into fiction have stirred endless debate over the years, especially in literary circles. Compared with, say, the recent scandal around Life of M, Rachel Cusk's novel about a celebrity allegedly inspired by Natalie Portman, Elsa and Raúl's creative plundering seems relatively minor.
Nonetheless, the movie doesn't let either of them off the hook so easily. What Bitter Christmas understands better than any film I've seen recently is how angry good friends can get at each other, how the closest pals can suddenly become the most bitterly estranged. And here, I wonder if Almodóvar might be speaking from personal experience. His own history is famously full of clashes and reconciliations with regular collaborators — including great actors, like Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas — that have become part of his legend.
At the same time, I suspect that, for this filmmaker, art trumps life every time. How his characters come into being seems ultimately less important than what we feel for them and how we get drawn into their world, as we are in Bitter Christmas. If this is Almodóvar making the same movie over and over again, I truly hope he never stops.
Copyright 2026 NPR
