Almodóvar in crisis? Almodóvar repeating himself? Did Almodóvar make a boring film? What are you talking about? ‘Amarga Navidad‘ (‘Bitter Christmas‘ in the English distribution), the most recent film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is interesting, profound, colorful, strange, funny, tragic like almost all of his films. Some of his main themes are also present here – love, death, friendship, passion, the price of betrayal. But also something extra. At the age of 76, Almodóvar – who can already afford to write and direct whatever he wants, – begins to deal more and more with the artist’s relationship with old age, focusing on the type of artistic personality he knows best – the filmmaker. Fellini, Bergman or John Huston did it before him, at more or less similar stages of their lives and careers. He does it wonderfully in ‘Amarga Navidad‘.
Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed a film about a filmmaker who writes a film script about a filmmaker who writes a film script. Film within a film within a film, or script within a script within a script. In 2004 Elsa, a director with only two films on record (successful only with limited ‘cult’ audiences) is faced with panic attacks around Christmas. The people around her – her boyfriend who is a firefighter and does striptease to supplement his income, her mother on her deathbed, her inconsolable friend who has lost a child, another friend who is going through a marital crisis – are materials for the script of the film with which she hopes to overcome her creativity crisis. But all of these are actually in the script that, in 2025, Raúl, an elderly director, writes, also drawing inspiration from the lives of those around him – his assistant who decides to leave him after decades of collaboration to help a friend whose son is seriously ill and his lover who becomes his assistant. Life and imagination merge in what the two creators do. Girlfriends, boyfriends, friends and lovers read the scripts and are never satisfied with the way their lives are transformed into fiction. But without life there would be no emotion, and without emotion there is no art. In addition, death is always lurking around the corner. Many of the characters have the feeling that life has no meaning, or that their time is being wasted. The world around them is also transforming. Between 2004 and 2025, the differences are visible in the details, from mobile phones to the way people love or experience their sensations. In addition, let’s not forget, Raúl and the world of 2025 are also only the heroes of the script written by Pedro Almodóvar.
Has the Spanish director gone through or is he going through a similar crisis to his heroes? We can speculate that yes, or we can consider that what we see on screen in this film is a sublimation of repeated crises, doubts, the relationship between reality, personal experience and their transformation into art on screen. In any case, if there was a crisis, Almodóvar overcame it by making another moving film, which tells a lot about art and its creators, about reality and imagination, about death and the changing world around us, a film with heroes with whom we empathize from the first moment as spectators. Especially heroines, because Almodóvar the contemporary master of female psychology, does not deny himself in this case either, although in this film the male characters are also very well outlined. For actors, working with Almodóvar must be a formidable experience. Some of the cast members are actors he has worked with before, such as Leonardo Sbaraglia (Raúl). Other collaborations, such as the one with Bárbara Lennie who plays Elsa, are firsts and they fit perfectly into the Almodóvar universe.
Is ‘Amarga Navidad‘ not on par with Almodóvar‘s best films? Maybe it’s not easy even for Almodóvar to make films as good as Almodóvar‘s best films. For me, this is one of the best films of 2026.