Pedro Almodovar's new film "Bitter Christmas" is a story inside a story, NPR's review said, continuing the Spanish director's habit of mixing melodrama with details that sound an awful lot like his own life.
The film begins in Madrid in the winter of 2004. A director named Elsa, played by Barbara Lennie, is having severe panic attacks and migraines. Her boyfriend, Bonifacio, played by Patrick Criado, drives her to the emergency room and, later, to a rich friend who has high-grade painkillers. Bonifacio is a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper; a flashback shows the bachelorette party where they met, and Elsa's first move, the review noted, was not to ask him out but to ask whether he wanted to star in an underwear commercial she was directing.
Then the film pulls back. Elsa is a character in a screenplay being written in 2026 by Raul, a veteran director played by Leonardo Sbaraglia. Elsa is a fictional stand-in for Raul, who is himself a stand-in for Almodovar, NPR's critic wrote. Like Elsa, Raul has suffered anxiety attacks and migraines, and Almodovar has spoken in interviews about dealing with the same medical issues. Raul also has a supportive boyfriend, Santi, whom he sometimes takes for granted, and a longtime assistant, Monica, played by Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, who is his closest confidante and, the review teases, a source of the anger promised by the title.
The film cuts between the two time frames and invites viewers to sort the similarities and differences. That structure will be familiar to anyone who has seen "Pain and Glory," "Bad Education" or "Volver," films in which Almodovar has drawn on his history and played with how art imitates life. NPR's review pushed back on the idea that he is simply making the same movie over and over, even as it conceded the charge is "worth unpacking": the films are still full of strong women and sensitive men, and still meticulously color-coordinated.
"Bitter Christmas," in this telling, is less a holiday movie than a portrait of a director who cannot stop turning private distress into fiction, and of the people who have to live with that habit. The 2004 plot gives Almodovar his usual cocktail of illness, desire and punch lines; the 2026 frame asks what it costs to keep rewriting those episodes.
Whether the nested structure feels absorbing or merely clever will be up to audiences. NPR called the film "splendid" and said it cuts "absorbingly" between its two stories. For a filmmaker this deep into a career, that is the test: not whether the colors and the women and the sensitive men are back, but whether the new frame still has something to say about anger among people who love one another.