OVERVIEW
Two stories run parallel in Bitter Christmas, set two decades apart. In Madrid, December 2004, a cult filmmaker named Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) lives through a stormy long weekend with her mother newly dead and her migraines getting worse. In 2026, a director named Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) sits at his computer and writes her into existence, sentence by sentence, while his longtime assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) reads the pages and starts pushing back on whose lives he is borrowing from.
BACKGROUND
By now, Almodóvar’s habit of writing himself into his films is as emblematic of his work as his use of saturated primary colors and opulent interiors. He has been doing it for close to four decades, and Bitter Christmas is the fourth entry in the loose self-portrait line that runs through Law of Desire, Bad Education, and Pain and Glory. He has openly described it as the film “where I’ve been cruelest with myself,” positioning it as an unofficial sequel to the more explicitly autobiographical Pain and Glory. It also marks his seventh film in official competition at Cannes.
THE REVIEW
If Pain and Glory saw 70-year-old Almodóvar at a moment of physical collapse, wondering if his best work was behind him, Bitter Christmas at 76 is post-Golden Lion, post-English-language detour, which has him asking even harder questions, especially whether he should. Because its predecessor studied character so thoroughly and made its points so elegantly, Bitter Christmas starts at a deep disadvantage, and it struggles for a long while to justify what the director is going for. Once it does, it jumps drastically from mediocre to fantastic.
It opens, as these films usually do, with longtime collaborator Alberto Iglesias channeling Bernard Herrmann in violent strings, a treat as always, before the energy gets sucked out of the room fast over the hour that follows. It spends much of its first act inside the movie-within-a-movie, which is largely uninteresting and messy in its handling of narrative and tone. Characters drop from existence, and it all feels like a bad deja vu. The visuals give no help either. For all the striking sets and costumes we have come to expect from him, the framing itself is all rather plain, shot at the level of a basic telenovela. A stripper dance sequence in particular is almost embarrassingly bad in how little it seems to care.
A little past the one-hour mark, the film fakes its own ending, and honestly, I was ready to walk out right there. As it turns out, the faults of the first half were all by design, woven into the director’s themes and feeding the much stronger second half, which somehow makes the first half make sense in retrospect. It builds to a fantastic climax in which Raúl and Mónica talk through his creative block, and in truth, Almodóvar’s own. He makes sharp points about the state of the industry and the unrealistic expectations we, the audience, place on directors whose past work once touched us. The script is smart and witty, and lands in a moving conclusion.
As for the cast, the performances are adequate, though they never reach the level of those in Pain and Glory. Overall, it feels like a minor work from him, and the fact that the first act is bad on purpose does not quite excuse how tough it is, well, to sit through it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
With Bitter Christmas, Almodóvar once again builds a film to critique himself, and for that critique to work, the first half is deliberately confusing and convoluted. The second half is much stronger, a genuine self-study of a director facing a creative block and unsure what comes next. One can only hope that somewhere during the festival, he caught a screening of La Bola Negra, and walked out of it ready to make something like that himself next.