Bitter Christmas

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

BITTER CHRISTMAS   ***

Pedro Almodóvar

2026

IDEA:  Raúl, a filmmaker in physical and creative decline, writes a new screenplay about a filmmaker quite like him, drawing inspiration from his life and his acquaintances. 

BLURB:  An auteur’s late-career work is viewed fundamentally differently than their other work. Saddled with expectations built up by audiences over time, it carries the burden of an entire oeuvre and established persona, and is equally liable to being received as an august capstone or a “minor” work by an artist past their prime. Few films have so plainly articulated this condition as Bitter Christmas, which is self-reflexively and self-deprecatingly designed by Almodóvar as a minor work that also functions as a career summation. An autofiction about Almodóvar’s penchant for autofiction, it surpasses Pain and Glory for sheer creative solipsism with its nesting narrative structure that gives us not one, but two stand-ins for the Spanish auteur. Both stories, the one about Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and the one about Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), concern the interpersonal effects of making fiction using real people from one’s life. Most of Bitter Christmas takes place inside Raúl’s screenplay of the same name (“a suitable title,” quips Elsa), where Almodóvar indulges in his aesthetic and melodramatic loves: chicly dressed and color-coordinated homes (and people), a flowery Alberto Iglesias score, women on the verge of nervous breakdowns and women supporting each other through them. The story itself is of uneven interest, despite containing such stellar scenes as a male striptease (courtesy Patrick Criado) that Almodóvar keeps on going well past the point of narrative sense, and a sojourn on Lanzarote where the black-sand beaches make his vibrant reds and yellows pop like never before. It’s in the final, intensely-acted finale that the filmmaker retroactively makes the meandering and recycled qualities of “Bitter Christmas” the whole point. Raúl is aging, depressed, physically infirm, diminished in prestige, and likely out of new ideas. Almodóvar doesn’t sanitize or placate this alter-ego; his most daring move in a film with not too many of them is confess his own sickness as an artist, and, rather than apologize for it, claim it as a compulsion he simply cannot stop. It’s the kind of naked honesty that makes a minor work a major act of self-exposure.