Bitter Christmas: Pedro Almodóvar makes himself the butt of the joke in a slippery meta drama

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival 

It’s not exactly fair, what Pedro Almodóvar does with Bitter Christmas, the Spanish great’s meta-squared take on the often vampiric nature of creative inspiration. Returning to Cannes competition after his two-movie flirtation with Venice brought him the Golden Lion for The Room Next Door, Almodóvar has made an in-betweener feature, yet one made with such brio and bonhomie, you can’t but be inclined to let him away with it. The film’s trick-mirrors and hasty retractions land glibly, like a conversation with some chatty barfly who is quick to cover up a faux pas with a “Hey, I was only joking.” But here, in the most genial and self-deprecating of ways, the joke’s on him, and it’s quite a funny one.

Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is the first of two readily identifiable Almodóvar surrogates — i.e. filmmakers tussling with an elusive storytelling muse while alternately relying on and taking for granted their very hot boyfriends. Beset by blinding migraines, Elsa has been in a creative rut of late, but now starts, tentatively, to write a screenplay. It’s her first since, after a few setbacks to her moviemaking aspirations, she went into TV commercials, a career which aside from a fat salary, also landed her a boyfriend. Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) is a fireman/stripper — that is, a firefighter by day who oils up and strips down for hen parties by night. If this smokeshow-twice-over character seems improbable, when you learn that he’s also sensitive and endlessly solicitous of Elsa despite her self-absorption, you may start to suspect someone is futzing about with the limits of fictional believability here.

And so it proves to be. Elsa and Bonifacio are characters in a screenplay being worried at by successful filmmaker Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) another Almodavatar, and perhaps a truer one than Elsa, given his shock of silver hair and the fact that of all the characters, he comes out the worst. Raúl also has a hot partner in Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) who long-suffers in the background and on whom Raul’s gaze seldom focuses. 

Raúl is far more engaged with his assistant Monica (a fantastic Aitana Sánchez-Gijon), who announces that after many years, she is quitting to care for a friend with a seriously ill child. As recompense for her loyalty, Raul plunders that very story for his screenplay (also called Bitter Christmas despite also not being particularly bitter, nor very Christmassy), transmuting it into the character of Natalia (Milena Smit), a former model and old friend of Elsa’s who is in a deep depression following the death of her child. Elsa tries to coax her out of her grief with a trip to Lanzarote, even though the island’s therapeutic powers have done little for her relationship with her best friend Patricia (Vicky Luengo), who has left in a huff after an argument over how she is handling her toxic marriage. 

Against the unearthly backdrop of the island’s volcanic beaches an already tenuous movie starts to feel borderline abstract. The bright popping colours that are essentially muscle memory to Almodóvar, stand out almost indecently against the black Canarian sands and the conversations between Elsa and her friends grow stilted and strange. The always sympathetic Lennie, in her first major role for the director, is very good, but limited in what she can achieve with a role that, unlike the parts Almodóvar has conceived for Penélope Cruz, for example, is never allowed to become too vivid. When you copy a copy, a lot of the lifelike detail gets lost and only the bold, highest-contrast elements remain. 

But while it’s disorienting, it’s also kind of fascinating to follow a storyline that is patently a work-in-progress, in which connections are still being workshopped and characterisations are all but annotated with “come back to this later!” or “needs backstory?” And if overtly acknowledging insubstantiality is not the same thing as substance, the third meta level —Almodóvar’s own — gives even this slippery little number a bit of heft. 

During a redeemingly scathing finale, Monica outlines in furious detail every single thing she finds lacking in Raúl’s screenplay and it is every single thing we might have considered a flaw in Almodóvar’s. Once more, he’s way ahead of us, which is only right for a film that feels like a stopgap made with one eye on the next, perhaps more profound thing coming down the pike. Still, if Bitter Christmas is just the harrumph before the actual event, it’s a highly diverting one: Nobody clears his throat like Pedro Almodóvar.