Amarga Navidad
Pedro Almodóvar (2026)
Fortyish Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) has a terrible migraine that’s getting worse. The first few scenes of Bitter Christmas, set in December 2004, describe her visit, accompanied by her younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), to a Madrid hospital’s A&E department. It’s not long before the screen announces ‘2025’ and shows a grey-haired man working on his laptop: Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is writing a script in which Elsa is the main character. Over the course of the next 100 minutes or so, Pedro Almodóvar’s narrative moves back and forth between the lives of Elsa and of the man creating her. In the closing stages, Almodóvar makes as clear as can be that Raúl is his own alter ego – although much of the audience will already have twigged that. The confirmation that we’ve been watching autofiction arrives much too late to redeem a film that’s mostly bland, even banal. In stressing how awful it is to be an internationally renowned, much-honoured auteur, now getting old and with his best work behind him, Almodóvar succeeds only in underlining the self-commiseration that shapes Bitter Christmas.
Elsa is, like Raúl, a filmmaker – or used to be. Neither of her films was a success though they’ve developed something of a cult following; she now makes her living directing commercials. One of Elsa’s films was shot partly in the hospital where the opening scenes of Bitter Christmas take place, and Dr García (Carmen Machi), who treats Elsa there and diagnoses a panic attack in conjunction with the migraine, recognises her. The location shooting in the hospital also explains Elsa’s firm insistence on now staying in one room rather than another on the same ward – she wants to avoid the room in which one of her characters died. Dr García feels that she’s seen Bonifacio before, too. He thinks not until Elsa asks if the doctor has been to any hen parties lately, and the answer is yes: Bonifacio’s a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper – stage name Beau – at weekends. When she’s discharged from hospital and they return home, Elsa recalls how she first met Bonifacio, a year ago, when he was performing at a club. He next accepted an offer to appear in an underwear commercial she was soon to shoot then started sharing her bed and apartment. Once she’s had this flashback, Elsa still feels ill and calls her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo), who, as well as putting Elsa in touch with a psychiatrist, tells her where she can get hold of the best medication for panic attacks. Elsa and Bonifacio turn up at a party hosted by Gabriela (Rossy de Palma), who supplies the tablets that Elsa needs. She still has a bad head and goes to rest in a bedroom, amid the pile of party guests’ coats. She’s woken by Amaia Romero (as herself), who sits next to Elsa to deliver a Chavela Vargas song, rather loudly. This seems the last thing a migraine sufferer needs though we’re probably not meant to think that’s why the song moves Elsa to tears.
In 2025, Raúl tells his personal assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) that his screenplay – for a film called ‘Bitter Christmas’ – draws on his own experience of a panic attack in 2004. Also acknowledging that his screen fiction often draws on reality, Raúl announces a central theme of Bitter Christmas. Mónica, apparently coincidentally, tells him she wants an immediate sabbatical, but doesn’t at first say why, simply informing him that Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), who is Raúl’s live-in boyfriend and domestic factotum, will be able to deal with everything in her absence. (As with Elsa and Bonifacio, there’s a big age difference between Raúl and Santi.) Raúl wheedles out of Mónica, just before she goes on leave, that she’s going to care for a friend called Elena, whose son has cancer. Mónica also takes this opportunity to advise Raúl to get a life outside filmmaking. She is barely out of the door before Raúl goes back to his screenplay, writing that Elsa receives a phone call from her friend Elena. He then quickly changes the name Elena to Natalia. Back in 2004, Elsa takes a call from Natalia (Milena Smit), whose young son was killed in a road accident two years previously.
It will be clear how Bitter Christmas basically works; the set-up is elaborated by Elsa’s deciding that she too must write another film. In a session with the psychiatrist (María Morales), she explains that she learned of her mother’s death while shooting the pants advert with Bonifacio. The psychiatrist suggests that Elsa go on vacation to process her bereavement; she heads for a villa in Lanzarote with Patricia and her little boy, Lorenzo (Nico Martín). Patricia is now reeling from the discovery that her husband has been unfaithful. The holiday doesn’t do much for her self-esteem when she finds out that Elsa’s script is about two grieving women friends, one with an adulterous husband, on an island not unlike Lanzarote. Once Patricia has angrily headed back to Madrid with Lorenzo, Elsa recalls her last meeting with her mother (Gloria Muñoz) then invites Natalia to take Patricia’s place in the villa. The still grief-stricken Natalia attempts suicide on Lanzarote but Elsa gets her to a hospital in time to save her. When Natalia comes round, the conversation between the two women echoes Elsa’s final conversation with her late mother.
It goes almost without saying that Raúl has learned in the meantime from Mónica that her friend’s son has died and that Elena has tried but failed to take her own life. Once Mónica reads Raúl’s script, she’s furious, and demands he remove Natalia from the storyline. She accuses Raúl of refusing to accept his filmmaking career is in irreversible decline, of exploiting other people’s tragedies in the absence of any original ideas, of treating Santi shabbily. It now emerges that the two men’s relationship began on a weekend in … 2004. Shocked by Mónica’s outburst, Raúl tells her that he should have sought inspiration instead from the more than two decades that she has worked with him. It seems meant to be an act of contrition that he changes his screenplay’s title from ‘Amarga Navidad’ to ‘Dulce Elsa’, the title character to be based not on himself but on Mónica. Santi, who already knows from Raúl that he inspired the character of Elsa’s boyfriend, is curious about what happens to Bonifacio in the revised screenplay. Raúl replies that he doesn’t yet know himself but needs to be left alone to write. Santi uncomplainingly gets the message. Raúl returns to his laptop.
Involved as the narrative is, its layering doesn’t enrich Bitter Christmas. Those of us familiar with his recent work not only will understand from the start what Almodóvar is up to, but may well also wonder why he is, in effect, repeating himself, after Pain and Glory (2019). It’s true that the latter, rather than critiquing a writer-director’s life and art, moved more simply between an ageing filmmaker’s past and present, but the results were far more rewarding. It isn’t naturally easy for a film to dramatise the art of writing. Almodóvar’s solution is to over-rely on what has become a cinema cliché – the writer-as-parasite, using the private lives and traumas of people they know as creative fodder. Woody Allen was doing this decades ago, as one strand of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and as the main premise of Deconstructing Harry (1997). Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Josephine Decker’s Shirley (2020) are just two more recent examples. The structure of Bitter Christmas is also reminiscent of the Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman collaboration Adaptation (2002); unlike that film, though, there’s no dramatic or comic traction between the writer’s story and the story that he’s in the throes of writing.
The opening scenes of Bitter Christmas are baffling at first. Your immediate reaction to Elsa’s hospital visit is to think (a) that Bárbara Lennie isn’t a migraine sufferer (unlike Almodóvar, by all accounts), (b) that Madrid citizens in 2004 enjoyed an exceptional quality of public healthcare. Elsa checks in wearing dark glasses and unsmiling but doesn’t seem fragile (later, when she’s told to lie back slowly in bed, Lennie lies back rather quickly). The A&E waiting room is almost deserted, and Elsa is seen without delay. The medic (Antonio Romero) who first sees her administers strong painkillers; as soon as Elsa says (again, without delay) that these aren’t working, she’s kept in for the night and receives further treatment. Yet the male doctor has also apologised that, due to the public holiday and all, the hospital is very busy. Is Almodóvar trying to be unconvincing? Once it’s clear that Elsa is a character in Raúl’s script-in-progress, you think that perhaps he is – and is meaning to convey this is how the business of writing happens: discard the first draft, move on to the next one … Even if this is what Almodóvar intends, it doesn’t work. We don’t see Raúl’s improved versions of parts of Elsa’s story (not that we’d want to) – only the next stage of that story, which is often as implausible as that opening hospital episode. (I won’t trouble giving examples of what doesn’t make sense in later episodes.) And none of this justifies Bárbara Lennie’s weak acting: Elsa’s panic attacks are no more persuasive than her migraines.
As in The Room Next Door (2004), some of the best things in Bitter Christmas are – or, at least, should be – incidentals. The woman at the hospital reception desk whose next customers, after Elsa has checked in, are a young male couple with bloodied faces; the receptionist scolds them for not wiping cocaine traces from the credit card they hand her as ID. Dr García, with her good memory for faces and poor understanding of what a ‘cult’ film is. Beau/Bonifacio’s flamboyantly erotic striptease for a hen party. What these bits have in common – and what makes them rain in the desert of Bitter Christmas – is humour. Also as with The Room Next Door, you’re increasingly aware that it’s a bit sad to be so cheered by the décor and clothes – vividly patterned curtains in Elsa’s holiday villa, how the different-coloured tops worn by characters sharing a scene complement each other – just because more substantial elements are unsatisfying. Alberto Iglesias’ music is as melodic and sensitive as ever yet has no connection with the uninvolving story it’s trying to serve. Shortly before her suicide attempt, Natalia, while Elsa is taking a phone call, catches the eye of a young boy sitting at a nearby table in the restaurant. He keeps smiling at her, then laughing; the more the boy engages with her, the worse it is for Natalia. This is just about the only moment emotionally strong enough for the narrative to acquire – but so briefly – a dramatic life of its own. Although it goes without saying that an Almodóvar film looks good, memorable images here are few (this isn’t meant as a criticism of the cinematographer, Pau Esteve Birba, working with Almodóvar for the first time). The visual highlights are mostly on Lanzarote: a far overhead shot of Elsa and Patricia side by side on the beach, with the tide coming in; Elsa and Natalia walking through an extraordinary landscape of vineyards that Natalia mistakes for graves. (According to Google AI, in Lanzarote’s ‘unique volcanic wine region … vines are planted in deep, semi-circular hollows dug out of thick layers of black volcanic ash, surrounded by stone walls to protect them from the wind’.)
Mention of graves calls to mind Parallel Mothers (2021), Almodóvar’s most overtly political film to date. The Room Next Door, which came next, could be seen as a contribution to debates about assisted suicide and featured a (long) monologue about global warming. On paper, Bitter Christmas seems to represent a welcome reversion to more familiar personal themes on Almodóvar’s part. But as with his near-contemporary Steven Spielberg’s recent Disclosure Day – a return, to his suspenseful sci-fi comfort zone after a few years of genre-hopping – the result is more than disappointing. In an interview with IndieWire in October 2024 (when The Room Next Door had just premiered), Almodóvar described Bitter Christmas, presumably in the works at the time, as a ‘tragic comedy about gender’. The film he’s made hardly ever feels tragic, is rarely comic and seems to say remarkably little about gender – except that you keep wondering whether it might have been more dynamic if the character of Elsa had been a man.
Although Bárbara Lennie is inadequate, it must be said that Elsa is anyway a remote conception – the unfinished alter ego of a character who’s nothing more than Almodóvar’s representative on screen (the Antonio Banderas character in Pain and Glory was much more than that). Lennie comes off particularly badly because she has the largest role. There’s nothing like a 50-50 division of screen time between the two parts of Bitter Christmas – until that eleventh-hour foregrounding of Raúl/Almodóvar’s creative plight, the Elsa story dominates. And Raúl is less in evidence than Elsa because his character is so under-developed: Leonardo Sbaraglia, who gave a beautiful performance in his small but key role in Pain and Glory, is wasted here. There’s not much to Mónica either, though Aitana Sánchez-Gijón’s zest energises her scenes. Mónica’s lesser criticisms of Raúl’s ‘Bitter Christmas’ screenplay include that Bonifacio just disappears from the story – a disappointment for Bitter Christmas viewers too because Patrick Criado makes Bonifacio more interesting than the toy boy/sex object conception might suggest, even if his exertions at the hen party are the highlight. Quim Gutiérrez, excellent in Robin Campillo’s Red Island (2023), is surprisingly cast but effective as Raúl’s placid lover and dogsbody. Gutiérrez suggests, and holds in tension, Santi’s recognition of his calcified, somewhat demeaning domestic life, and his affection for Raúl. The unmistakable Rossy de Palma is only on screen for a couple of minutes, but you’re grateful for them.
A major weakness of Bitter Christmas is that the Raúl part of the narrative is no sharper than the desultory Elsa part and has no more credibility – even though it wouldn’t take much to inject a modicum of reality. For example, when Mónica tells Raúl she’s taking leave, he might at least take issue with her perfunctory assurance that Santi will be able to take over her job – might tell her that, if she thinks that, Mónica really must think Raúl’s on the way out as a sought-after cultural celebrity. And Monica, during their climactic showdown about his declining powers, might at least console Raúl that his filmmaking reputation is such that most of the press will continue to praise his work even if it’s not much cop nowadays. That’s certainly what seems to be happening with Bitter Christmas – 90% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (from 59 critics’ reviews so far). Almodóvar is highly aware of what he’s doing, of course, and probably realises that a big chunk of his audience shares his awareness. Although that makes him more honest about his writing than Elsa or Raúl, it doesn’t make it easier to sympathise with his woe-is-me-ism. Perhaps it’s just as well that he’s getting mostly good notices. The thought that Pedro Almodóvar might take disparagement of Bitter Christmas as proving his supposedly tragic point would be even more dismaying than the film itself is.
1 September 2026
