Bitter Christmas (2026) - Review

By Conor Reid.

It’s a cliché, writer’s block. As is writing about writer’s block. Stephen King’s Paul Sheldon regains his ability to write after a crazy fan cripples him and he has to kill her; Marty in Seven Psychopaths only overcomes his block after throwing in with some real criminals; Charlie Kaufman wrote Adaptation. The poet Charles Bukowski said, and I’m likely paraphrasing here, that writing about your writer’s block is better than writing nothing at all. In a roundabout way, writer’s block can be a handy device. But often times the solution to it is portrayed simply. Get out more; don’t think about it; try something else; steal.

In art and in life we always end up saying more than we intend. Even what we leave out of our stories can betray us. Such is the case for the protagonists of Pedro Almodóvar’s newest film, Bitter Christmas, an autofiction about autofiction that leaves you scrambling in the dark for answers once it’s all over. Thoroughly honest and interesting, yet not always emotionally engaging, Bitter Christmas is, from some perspectives, quite a horrifying picture. Its story-within-a-story structure and the perverse actions of its leads brings to mind questions of where the artists exists in relation to other people, and if there is even a reconcilable position between story and reality, for any of us.

We follow Raúl, an aging film director eager to put something new out in to the world, but finding himself stuck in a writer’s block. He writes the titular Bitter Christmas, a script about a young woman working in publicity named Elsa getting over the loss of her mother, mirroring his own loss. For most of the film we cut back and forth between their lives, as Raúl tweaks and irons out the details of the movie within the movie. In one of Raúl’s first scenes, he is seen discussing Bitter Christmas with his friend and agent, Mónica. She asks him if he is writing something autobiographical, and he says no, but that reality will find its way in to the piece without him realizing. Anyone who has ever made anything worth a damn can attest to this, but Raúl is underplaying the perverse steps he is going to end up taking to get his newest script off the ground.

Floundering in his attempt to make something meaningful, Raúl starts to take ‘inspiration’ from those in his personal life; namely Mónica. We are shown right away barely concealed parallels to Raúl’s personal life and Elsa’s story: They both have dead mothers, they both have impossibly loyal and sexy boyfriends that could be doing so much better than them, and they are both directors hungry to make another film. Raúl uses Elsa like a net, dipping her in and out of the quasi-fictional landscape of her personal life in the hopes of finding the driving factor that will make his script a success.

Major Spoilers Below.

It comes in drips and drabs but before long Raúl is lifting real life stories near-enough verbatim from those around him, particularly Mónica. He transposes in to Bitter Christmas characters based on Mónica’s loved ones, who themselves are going through horrible real-world tragedies (A woman whom Mónica loves attempts suicide, and Raúl has a young woman try to overdose herself with booze and pills in the script) much to Mónica’s justifiable chagrin.

This leads to multiple heated confrontations between the two where Raúl tries to logically argue why he should essentially be allowed - guilt free - to use the stories of others to find his own work. In a walk in the park he tells her repeatedly how nothing he has made for the last five years has gripped him, and that all he wants to do is make another film like that he cares about. Mónica tells him that his spark his gone, and he must accept it, but Raúl refuses. Like all big tragic heroes, he is unable to alter his course. To do so would be the same as death.

For many artists, this feeling is no doubt mutual, but Almodóvar - perhaps rightfully so - takes this often romantic ideal and flips it on its head, showing us the real perverse nature of the artists in all it’s ugliness. Raúl begs and complains and desperately flails around as if drowning, all for the absolute freedom to make whatever he wants, however he wants it, and damn all who he takes from to do it. Mónica, to her credit, doesn’t let him; letting loose a torrent of criticisms of Raúl that cut him deeply, illuminating how that the director is happy to pilfer from the lives of others for material but isn’t so keen on picking his own life apart for the same reason, less he come across any uncomfortable truths about himself. By the middle portion of Bitter Christmas - the script in the movie - Raúl all but gives up on writing inspired by his own life.

What is quite a wonderful quality of the film is how near enough every scene leaks this sort of desperate quality. As Raúl writes Elsa’s story, his creation comes off as remarkably amateur. Characters are forgotten about, swapped in for others, scenes linger uncomfortably long, others seem to have barely any point at all; in short, his script’s a mess. He even shows the first draft to his boyfriend and insists on the usual ‘it’s only a first draft’ shtick. At times this can make the actual movie (The one for you and me) a bit of a slog to get through, but one has to go all the way with this thought and say that there is no other way it could have possibly been. If the story of Raúl’s Elsa had been as nail-biting or well put together as the fictional director would have liked, then there’d be hardly much point in him cannibalizing those closest to him.

And it is also clear in the way Elsa’s story is told is that, on some level, Raúl is aware of what he is doing. Elsa, in a similar vein to her creator, pries quite disgustingly in to the lives of those closest to her. She runs away to Lonzarote with a friend who has briefly separated from her husband, and in a moment of drunken weakness she reveals how little she thinks of her, claiming she knows she will get back together with her husband even though she is certain he’s been unfaithful. She puts that in to her own script, then essentially swaps this friend out with another when this friend gets fed up with her and leaves. This new friend is the thinly disguised insert of Mónica’s loved one, who in the film’s real world has lost a child. This fictional friend also bears that loss, and, like her inspiration, she tries to kill herself (Something Mónica told Raúl with no idea he would use it in a script). Raúl’s justifications after the fact - that his character is young while Mónica’s friend is old, and how different the accident was that killed a child - fall on deaf ears. Unable to face himself, Raúl hides behind the mask of Elsa, displacing his story on to her and in the end even trying to have her find some sort of redemption. In a way, it is quite sad, showing that we can often only find the peaceful resolutions to life’s problems in the fictional worlds we create. This is a picture that can make one feel remarkably insecure, and I wager that this is very much the point. This isn’t to say that the film takes Mónica’s side; in fact it hardly provides any easy answers. To say that Raúl was justified in what he did is an equally arguable position.

Which leads the the film’s ending. We don’t see a proper resolution to Elsa’s story, instead we have her story start all over again when Raúl seems to find new inspiration after his confrontation with Mónica. His eyes ‘light up’ suddenly, realizing that she is the subject that he should be writing about all along, not himself. Bear in mind, this comes right after she has told him to leave her and her loved ones out of his stories. But Raúl can’t help himself. He stares at her across a table at a small outdoor cafe, glaring at her in a - rather distressing - glazed over look that gives the impression he is picking her apart right there in the open, violently objectivising her, leaving no room for herself as a proper human with her own thoughts and feelings, and she, of course, breaks down. Mónica leaves, resigned to her fate of seeing ‘herself’ up on the big screen, with a thousand perverted eyes observing a story she did not consent to be shown. Raúl, newly inspired, defeats his block. Whether or not he’ll hit a similar block, we can’t know. But, for now, he gets away with it all.

I wouldn’t call this a hopeful movie. By showing us the often vampiric nature of the artist without much compromise - a feat in itself - one could say it is calling on us to rise above such things, though I doubt it. Bitter Christmas seems very comfortable in showing the flimsy barriers between reality and fiction, and how we all take from each other in ways that are often quite disgusting and cowardly and just leaves it at that. Perhaps there is no alternative.

In spite of our own occasional awareness of what we are doing wrong, the movie proposes a reality in which people are as locked in to their own natures as the characters they create, unable to stray from the course of our stories, even in to the most surprising and unexpected endings.

Speaking of; the final scene of the picture has Raúl starting his new script, and having a brief exchange with his boyfriend, Santi. Santi has been the ever-loyal, if a bit boring, partner to Raúl. Significantly younger than him, he has been by his side the whole movie, allowing him whatever ridiculous space he asks for - in one scene, while making dinner, Santi has to hear Raúl say, pathetically, that he must have 100 percent creative freedom - and seeming never to sway. But, when Raúl leans over his laptop, asking Santi to share some personal details, prying as Elsa did with her friends, the young man answers back with a very polite ‘No’. Not a total defeat, of course, but it was something. Maybe there is something in the future for Santi, but for his lover there doesn’t seem to be anything. He comfortably resigns himself to forever be facing outward for his art.

Presented very boldly, with excellent attention to colour and an honest heart - with only, I think, a small bit of naval-gazing - Bitter Christmas presents an artist’s dilemma as seen through the eyes of an artist, and doesn’t shy away from the harsher side of what people need to do sometimes in order to create. Whether they should go to such lengths or not, the film leaves up to us.