Bitter Christmas: Pedro Almodóvar’s Difficult Self-Portrait

Everything interesting in Bitter Christmas, the latest feature from the revered Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, happens in the last act, which doesn’t just make it a difficult film to write about, but also to watch. Though there is a purposefulness behind the seemingly aimless nature of its first three quarters, at a certain point, an intentionally unfocused movie is indistinguishable from one sprawling all over the place without meaning to, and it’s impossible to parse how much of Bitter Christmas is the former and how much is the latter. I would say that what Almodóvar pulls off in the end makes the rest of the film worthwhile, but only barely and only if you’re invested enough in his ongoing arc as an artist to find intriguing the idea of a self-lacerating late-career self-portrait about the nature of inspiration.

Bitter Christmas begins in 2004 with Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a director who now only works in advertising but previously made two films, neither of them a hit, though each has a cult following. Elsa lives with her solicitous boyfriend, a firefighter named Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), in a typically gorgeous Almodóvarian apartment in Madrid done up in lusciously bold colors. She’s obviously successful, though lately she’s been dealing with debilitating migraines, the most recent of which has gotten severe enough to send her to the emergency room of a hospital that she coincidentally once used as a film location. If Elsa’s life doesn’t entirely line up — if she, say, feels a lot like an older gay man poured into the body of a younger straight woman — that’s revealed to be by design. She’s a stand-in for a character who is himself a stand-in for Almodóvar, a silver-haired filmmaker named Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who, in 2026, has been writing the saga of Elsa and Bonifacio as his latest script.

Raúl, unlike Elsa, is internationally revered, to the point where he responds tetchily to his longtime assistant Mónica’s (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) reminder that he’s been chosen to receive an LGBTQ+ prize by noting that he didn’t make anything this year. But he and Elsa have plenty of other things in common. Elsa is experiencing for the first time the panic attacks Raúl has been having for decades, and Elsa met Bonifacio through his side job as an exotic dancer, which is how Raúl met his own handsome, doting younger partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez). Santi is unbothered to find himself being used for Raúl’s work, even before Raúl assures him that Bonifacio isn’t actually Santi, that he’s an invented character who just bears certain resemblances to his lover. But Raúl isn’t being entirely honest about the clear line between real life and the transformative stuff of fiction, as we see when Mónica tells him that after 20 years of service, she needs to quit to help out an old friend, Elena, whose son is undergoing cancer surgery with only a 50 percent survival rate. Suddenly, in the script, Elsa develops an old friend whose son has died—and whose name Raúl initially types as “Elena” before wising up and changing it to “Natalia” instead.

Even when Bitter Christmas recreates the feeling of watching someone try to write a story without any idea what it’s about, the film is not without pleasures. It barely needs to be said that the knitwear and interiors are desperately enviable or that the settings are exquisite, especially when Elsa takes an excursion to the volcanic island of Lanzarote, staying in a villa with a pool alongside black-sand beaches. The sequence in which Elsa first meets Bonifacio is a delightfully romantic version of a striptease, with Elsa and a colleague, who are there scouting for an underwear commercial, sitting among a crowd of rowdy bachelorette partygoers. A scene in which a suffering Elsa goes to a house party (hosted by Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma)  in search of tranquilizers is both funny and warmly comforting, as she crawls into the pile of guest coats in the bedroom and a friend who stops by to check on her sings her a song. And a moment when Elsa’s friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) decides to leave her husband after listening to the entirety of a recording of Chavela Vargas singing “La Llorona” is a bold testament to the power of music to fuel an emotional journey.

But the question at the core of Bitter Christmas isn’t whether Raúl, and through him Almodóvar, has lost his touch. It’s whether he still has anything to say or if he’s just repeating himself while running through so many of his favorite things. Raúl likes to brandish the idea of autofiction like a shield to those around him who might object to his using aspects of their lives as material or to act like what he’s doing is unintentional — “Reality ends up sneaking in unnoticed.” But a darker conclusion the movie offers is that being an active filmmaker is so important to Raúl’s sense of identity that he’s willing to cannibalize his relationships if it means he’ll be able to keep working. The division between inspiration and vampirism isn’t neat in Bitter Christmas, and during its final scenes, the film presents a portrait of an artist as someone who can’t help but consume the lives of those around them if the urge strikes. It’s a damning self-assessment, but also a bracingly honest one that suggests Almodóvar still has plenty to offer, even if it’s by way of self-critique.