Bitter Christmas

Stories within stories inspired by other stories unfold in vivid intricacy in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest triumph of metafiction. We first meet Elsa, an actor and filmmaker struggling with panic attacks, who finds support in her eclectic network of friends and lovers. To get to the root of her crisis, she seeks inspiration in those around her, their shared pasts, their own domestic dramas, and her latest screenplay begins to spring forth. But Elsa is a work of fiction herself, a figment of filmmaker Raúl’s imagination as he scripts his newest opus. In the twilight of his career, Raúl grasps at novelty, but he too finds himself drawing, to an alarming extent, from the lives of his own cadre. The act of drawing inspiration is at once noble and vampiric in this playful study of creativity.