Bitter Christmas, 2026.
Written and Directed by Pedro Almodóvar.
Starring Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit, and Quim Gutiérrez.
SYNOPSIS:
In 2004, an ad director faces a turbulent Christmas weekend. In 2026, a filmmaker turns her story into a screenplay, blurring the lines between reality, fiction, and the people closest to him.
Writer/director Pedro Almodóvar may have finally gone too far in his fascination with blurring cinematic fiction and reality with stories about filmmakers. For starters, Bitter Christmas isn’t just the title; it’s also a rough-draft screenplay set 20 years ago, written by fading filmmaker Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia) as he tries to recapture some of the glory from when his career was on an upswing. By the end of this storyline, Raul seems incapable of writing a story without letting examples from his personal life bleed into the fiction, sometimes to the disapproving outrage of those closest to him. Ethical quandaries come up about consent for using the lives of others in his work, no matter what or how much he changes, but he deflects them as part and parcel of being a serious artist.
Then there is his creative process and screenplay, which is visualized as a movie within a movie, following Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), also a filmmaker (though more for advertisements), through a dry relationship with a firefighter/male stripper significant other, Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), and tumultuous times between a variety of friends dealing with everything from relationship woes to grief. Unsurprisingly, considering this is from Pedro Almodóvar, much of this comes with clear parallels to Raul’s life and dynamics, whether he wants to be inspired by it or not, and sometimes in ways we realize before he does. And while some of the characters in that movie certainly resemble them in appearance, Pedro Almodóvar doesn’t use the cinematic trick of having actors play dual roles.
What’s here is an aimless film about a struggling filmmaker writing something equally aimless. Not only are there scenes of a movie within a movie that Raul doesn’t know how to end or what’s missing from it, but flashbacks within that story make for a clunky Russian nesting doll. The result is a film that shortchanges its characters and offers little defined storytelling beyond Pedro Almodóvar’s usual modus operandi of art imitating life and vice versa. At the very least, part of that comes alive when the trademark melodrama comes alive during the third act in the real world, rather than only in the in-progress screenplay.
More baffling is that once Raul (and Pedro Almodóvar) seem to have figured out what both the fictional story and this movie should be, and the drama ramps up, it abruptly ends. That’s also not to say the filmmaker was in the midst of stumbling into something fresh regarding this narrative, but that it was picking up the pace and fleshing out more conflict within the characters and parallels to the fictional art strongly inspired by reality, either to be used as a coping mechanism or because Raul doesn’t know how to cope or address what clearly isn’t working within his own life.
There isn’t even that much bitterness until the third act. As for the Christmas aspect, that’s also nonexistent (unless one counts that the majority of the characters are seen in non-festive green and red wardrobes). The unfortunate truth is that with Bitter Christmas, Pedro Almodóvar is starting to become some of these fictional characters, and not necessarily in the manner he intends. His blurring of the lines between fiction and art remains intriguing and worth checking out, but now has unmistakable diminishing returns.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
