This guest post is written by Siddhant Adlakha. He went to the Cannes Film Festival for us to see this one!
You can discern a lot from the various titles of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest. Its original Spanish name, “Amarga Navidad,” is translated candidly in English as “Bitter Christmas,” reflecting its filmmaker protagonist’s carelessly acerbic approach to other people’s stories. Equally frank is its French title, “Autofiction,” which loosely describes the central premise, but similarly reflects the bluntness of its final act, which goes to great and verbose lengths to explain (and re-explain) its conflicts.
It’s a good film that should be great, building on what might be one of the director’s very best — the similarly self-reflexive “Pain and Glory” starring Antonio Banderas — but “Bitter Christmas” is also missing a certain X factor that has long made Almodóvar one of Spain’s greatest filmic exports.
The morality of transposing real stories into screenplays takes center stage early on, when, in 2026, middle-aged screenwriter Raúl (“Pain and Glory” star Leonardo Sbaraglia) begins pouring parts of himself into a story set in 2004, about ad director Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who seeks to resume writing her own scripts.
As Raúl types away on his laptop, we see Elsa’s imagined life play out in full, in detailed hues that make her as real as the man creating her in-the-moment. Essentially, “Bitter Christmas” is a tale of two parallel timelines, though one only exists as a fictitious byproduct of the other, and Almodóvar urges us to find the connections.
Some of these are made overt and obvious: Raúl tells his departing assistant of 20 years, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), about the weekend of his first panic attack in 2004, and a similar fate befalls Elsa, landing her in the very hospital where she shot her last feature film. As Raúl searches for answers through his fiction, so too does his fictitious muse, whose own struggles to put words on the page begin to reflect his own. Other threads, however, are strung indirectly.
Raúl’s gaunt appearance bears a resemblance to Esla’s kindly boyfriend Beau (Patrick Criado), a chiseled stripper and firefighter, whose existence is halfway between sexual fantasy and self-insert (he also resembles Raúl’s own boyfriend Santi, played by Quim Gutiérrez). That there are few one-to-one connections at first makes this story within a story all the more intriguing, turning the film into a kind of mischievous mystery.
However, the more both tales play out — Raúl’s and Elsa’s — the more they skirt the ethical lines of creativity by drawing on the most painful experiences of those around them. This is perhaps where “Bitter Christmas” finds its uncomfortable soul: As a film that makes you wonder exactly what faux pas Almodóvar is admitting to, or what guilt he’s trying to exorcise. His filmmaker characters constantly insist upon using reality as a wellspring; after all, this is where Almodóvar’s own most powerful works are born. But they’re not only telling their own stories. As dramatists, they unpack the fragile nexuses between two or more human beings, so their stories are never just their own.
Unfortunately, that both Raúl and Elsa come off as callously as they do (in pursuit of riveting sagas that expose the deep wounds of those around them) further suggests that Almodóvar has already done all the emotional wrestling he’s going to do with this dilemma. He leaves little emotional space for their justifications, and in the process, little room for the film to feel conflicted, or for his viewers to project their own ethical quandaries upon it.
Where the remarkably similar “Pain and Glory” confronted the nature of memory as a creative wellspring, “Bitter Christmas” gradually rips that process from within its creative characters and makes it almost entirely external, to the point that both Raúl and Elsa end up taking cues from events and experiences to which they have no claim. Beyond a point, the film ends up strangely didactic with regards to how fiction comes to be, offering practically no empathy for the process.
Perhaps this is some personal apologia made manifest, as the Spanish maestro gazes back on his nearly 50 years in filmmaking. But as late-career reflections go, it’s far from incisive. Almdóvar, otherwise a master of human complexity, paints himself into so many narrative corners here that his only way out involves lengthy, repetitive discussions of these themes ad nauseam. The movie practically breaks in order to accommodate this self-generated discourse, leaving his various narratives incomplete, and doing a disservice to his otherwise stellar cast.
Despite these third act missteps, the film is still an undeniably personal work that retains Almodóvar’s vibrant dramatic signatures. Its characters are richly formed, not only at their most vulnerable, but even at their most despicable and vindictive, ensuring that no matter what turns his autofiction takes, they each feel like multidimensional facets of his own being — even when this intimate, confessional quality ends up robbing “Bitter Christmas” of its dramatic dimensions and ethical intricacy.
Image credit: “Bitter Christmas“
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