Sometime around Christmas in 2024, an ad director, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), suffers from terrible migraines and has her first panic attack over the delayed grief for her mother, who died one year before.
Her infinitely supportive boyfriend, Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), who is so perfect that he works as a firefighter during the week and moonlights as a stripper on weekends, does his best to be there for her, but Elsa doesn’t seem particularly happy.
She also has two friends with sad stories of their own: Natalia (Milena Smit) lost her son in an accident, and Patricia (Victoria Luengo) contends with the fact that her off-screen husband is an asshole who recently started cheating on her.
All the while, in 2026, an acclaimed film director, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), is writing a screenplay about Elsa, an autofiction flick based on himself and his close ones, like his caring partner, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), and his assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). Since all of the above happens in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Bitter Christmas, it is easy to deduce that Raúl is a stand-in for the director himself, turning the film into a strange act of self-deprecating proclamation of creative stagnation. Instead of any kind of meditation on the topic, though, it mostly comes off as a confirmation of said artistic crisis.
Bitter Christmas does get to a juicy part that at least has some curious things to say about writer’s block and the lengths authors are willing to go to in mining their close circle’s lives for inspiration. However, this is all packed into the last 15 minutes, while what precedes is a surprisingly mind-numbing experience. Which is a fit, considering it’s an Almodóvar movie, but even more so, since it has several musical sequences in it, including one prolonged striptease number.
While melodrama always was a personal favorite and a special genre for Almodóvar, Bitter Christmas ventures past it into the soap opera territory with multiple suicide attempts, cheating spouses, and incessant, non-stop conversations. The telenovela vibe somehow seeps into the visual aesthetics as well, where in place of Almodóvar’s trademark dramatic camp there is dull imagery of upper-middle-class interiors and endless talking heads. As a wink to the idea that Raúl (i.e., Almodóvar) might be stagnating in his artistic choices, at least two characters always wear red and green tops alongside each other as a tribute to the director’s favorite color palette.
What Bitter Christmas lacks most is any sense that this artistic body has viable nerve endings.
The film does pick up some of Almodóvar’s usual dramatic energy and bittersweet humor in those last 15 minutes, when Mónica comes to blows with Raúl over him using her girlfriend’s suicide attempt as a plot point in his script. None of it compares to the rawness of Pain and Glory, but at least there are some lived-in thoughts that ring true, like a dig at the prospect of making Netflix movies or the director’s insistence on including his grief over his mother’s death as a narrative point in his stories.
The most interesting aspect of this “parallel lives” narrative is the barely-there existence of Santi and Bonifacio, mirroring each other. Both are essentially non-characters: one in a made-up scenario in the script, the other in his own life, acutely representing the way many creative people tend to see their partners - as serviceable. But this undercurrent is barely there, too, while the majority of the film is dedicated to multiple other ones that, to put it bluntly, just aren’t that captivating.
Meta is all fun and games, but here’s the thing about it: When the director’s alter ego is supposed to be writing a bad script, and the glimpses into that script take up most of the runtime, what we essentially end up with is simply not a very good film.
The film enjoys its U.S. premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Visit the official festival site for more information.