Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film Festivals | September 11, 2026
Great artists steal. Everything is copy. Life is your canvas. Being an artist means you’re probably used to taking at least a smidge of inspiration from your personal experiences, and confronting the ethical ramifications that accompany it. At what point does it become a problem for you to treat your friends, loved ones, or random passers-by as characters in your work? What happens if you go full Rachel Cusk? For Pedro Almodóvar, the answer is to just keep digging.
Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) is an ad director with a minor career as a cult filmmaker, which she defines as having made movies that nobody saw. These days, she’s living with her sweetheart himbo boyfriend and dealing with a series of debilitating headaches. What’s causing them and why? The answers lie with Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), her creator. He’s a director too, one who bears a striking resemblance to a certain Señor Pedro. His new script, his first in a while, is not coming together so easily. It needs heft, real stakes. Where could he find such a thing? Those closest to him should watch out.
In 2019, Almodóvar gave the world Pain and Glory, his semi-autobiographical tale of an ageing director who looks back on his life and wonders if his best years are behind him. It’s one of his greatest films, and one that follows in a proud tradition of beloved auteurs making movies about barely-veiled self-inserts who revel in the agonies of life, art, and balancing the two (see 8 1/2, All That Jazz.) He followed that up with some solid efforts, including three forays into the English language, but none have reached the heights of Pain and Glory. Almodóvar seems keenly aware of that, if Bitter Christmas is anything to go by. It might be his most meta effort, one he described as “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself.”
If Pain and Glory was a loving portrait of life as a canvas, Bitter Christmas is borderline self-loathing, but it takes its time getting there. The focus leaps between the fictional 2004 of Elsa’s world and the 2025 of Raúl, as he tries to write a script that feels true. Things seem pretty low-stakes at first. Elsa has a good life and little to worry about, and yet she’s having panic attacks and is left scrambling to find medication from one of her many acquaintances (enter the token Rossy de Palma cameo.) It all feels a touch frivolous at first. Why is this the story that’s causing Raúl such strife? There doesn’t seem to be much to it beyond the gorgeous backdrop of the volcanic sands of Lanzarote. But then Almodóvar plays his hand.
Elsa was not plucked from Raúl’s imagination. Her story is taken from Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), his loyal assistant, and he’s been liberal in borrowing from her most intimate revelations, which include a past romance and a suicide attempt he has only heard about second-hand. But it’s all up for grabs in the world of autofiction, right? The curtain pull that unveils the true focus of Bitter Christmas is a brilliant move by Almodovar. What felt like a lamentation about an ageing director entering his “minor hit” years suddenly becomes a fable on the ethics of cultural vampirism. It changes how you view everything you’ve seen leading up to the final act. But while it’s an elegant narrative trick, there is a problem with having the final act contain all of the good bits.
It doesn’t help that the film cannot escape the shadow of Pain and Glory. In fairness, that is kind of the point, but in practice, you yearn for Antonio Banderas and that impeccable script. Almodóvar is hanging a hat on it all, and getting ahead of the critiques by mocking his own neuroses. It makes for a noble viewing experience, but you also inevitably come to the same conclusion that Mónica does: sure, it’s a minor film in the canon, but he’s earned that right. Watch Pain and Glory first, then check out Bitter Christmas for the flipside of the creative conundrum.
Bitter Christmas had its North American premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It will be released in North America later this year.
