Dir: Pedro Almodovar | Spain DRAMA 93’
Bitter Christmas feels, at times, like just another Pedro Almodóvar film — only with the colour palette turned up a few notches brighter.
The film alternates between two stories. In 2004, Elsa, an advertising director, spends a long December weekend with her boyfriend Bonifacio and friends Patricia and Natalia. In 2026, Raúl, a screenwriter and director suffering from a prolonged creative drought, begins writing their story — which we gradually realise is also his own. Elsa becomes, in effect, his alter ego, allowing the film to explore the blurred boundaries between reality, fiction and autobiography.
It is a familiar Almodóvar preoccupation: the artist looking inward and turning the people closest to him into material. Raúl’s creative crisis becomes an excuse for examining his partner, his assistant and his most intimate relationships, while the film repeatedly asks where autobiography ends and invention begins.
There is plenty here that feels recognisably Almodóvar: the fractured relationships, emotional volatility, complicated families and characters who weaponise intimacy. The difference is largely visual. The Lanzarote setting gives the film a brighter, more saturated colour scheme, with primary colours and sun-drenched interiors replacing some of the more melancholy tones associated with his earlier work.
But beneath the colour, Bitter Christmas is surprisingly dark. The Christmas rituals remain, but the warmth has drained away. Conversations that begin politely deteriorate into recrimination, while long, uncomfortable silences expose resentments that have been accumulating for years. The title eventually feels less like a joke than a diagnosis.
The performances are uniformly sharp, the Spanish filmmaker’s usual collaborators refusing to reduce anyone to a familiar type — difficult mother, estranged sibling, peacemaker. These are contradictory, occasionally unpleasant people, observed rather than judged.
Yet the sense of déjà vu is difficult to escape. Bitter Christmas is accomplished, beautifully controlled and unmistakably Almodóvar, but it sometimes feels less like a new chapter than a variation on themes he has explored many times before — Almodóvar in brighter colours.
It will divide audiences, although whether it has enough emotional or formal originality to excite a new following is another question entirely. Like several directors of his generation Almodovar makes the same film over and again
IN UK CINEMAS 28 August 2026