ALMODÓVAR´S HOMECOMING

 

    original image and video courtesy ©El Deseo

The volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote hold secrets older than cinema itself, their black stones bearing witness to forces that reshape worlds from within. Here, between June and August 2025, Pedro Almodóvar returned to film his twenty-fourth feature, choosing terrain he knows intimately, having previously captured these Canary shores in Los abrazos rotos, to tell a story about grief, escape, and the curious ways life bleeds into fiction. 

Amarga Navidad arrives as homecoming. Fresh from Venice, where The Room Next Door earned him the Golden Lion for his first English-language venture, Almodóvar pivots back to Spanish with the ease of a man slipping into familiar rooms. The title itself carries double resonance: it references both Chavela Vargas's haunting ranchera, that rough-voiced interpreter whose songs have scored his most intimate moments in Kika, Carne trémula, La flor de mi secreto, and Julieta, and one of the twelve tales in his 2023 book El último sueño, a fragmentary autobiography disguised as fiction. 

The narrative follows Elsa, an advertising director whose mother dies during December's long holiday break. Rather than mourn, she drowns herself in work, a recognisable form of flight, until a panic attack forces stillness. Her partner, Bonifacio, becomes the anchor; her friend Patricia, the travelling companion. Together, they escape to Lanzarote while Bonifacio remains in Madrid. Yet their story runs parallel to another: that of screenwriter and film director Raúl Durán, creating a mise en abyme Almodóvar describes as exploring "how life and fiction are inseparably linked, sometimes painfully so." 

The director pitched this to IndieWire in October 2024 as "a tragic comedy about gender," promising moments where laughter and sorrow share the same breath. His ensemble reads like a reunion of trusted collaborators and fresh blood: Bárbara Lennie (La piel que habito), Leonardo Sbaraglia (Dolor y gloria), Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Milena Smit (both from Madres paralelas), Victoria Luengo (La habitación de al lado), alongside Patrick Criado and Quim Gutiérrez, who enter the Almodóvar universe for the first time. Carmen Machi, Rossy de Palma, and Gloria Muñoz complete the chorus. 

Behind the camera stands Pau Esteve Birba, a departure from Almodóvar's recent cinematographic partnerships with José Luis Alcaine and Edu Grau. Esteve Birba, known for his work on El buen patrón and Manuel Martín Cuenca's El autor, captured Amarga Navidad using the ARRI Alexa 35 with Panavision E Series anamorphic lenses, rendering Madrid's urban geometry against Lanzarote's otherworldly volcanic textures. Alberto Iglesias, Almodóvar's longtime composer, returns to score these emotional landscapes, while Teresa Font handles editing, and Antxon Gómez designs the visual world. 

The production moved swiftly: 45 days over six weeks, wrapping in mid-August 2025. El Deseo, the company Almodóvar founded with his brother Agustín, produced in collaboration with Movistar Plus+, thereby strengthening their bond following their success with La habitación de al lado. Warner Bros. Pictures Spain will release the film theatrically on March 20, 2026, before it streams exclusively on Movistar Plus+. Sony Pictures Classics, Almodóvar's North American partner for Dolor y gloria, Madres paralelas, and The Room Next Door, acquired U.S. distribution rights in August 2025, while Curzon secured the United Kingdom and Ireland. 

What emerges from early glimpses feels quintessentially Almodóvar: saturated colours, complex women navigating impossible emotional weather, the blurring of autobiography and invention. After his Manhattan sojourn proved he could command English with the same authority as Spanish, he chose to return home, to the language that shaped him, to landscapes both interior and geological. The film promises to restore that early Almodóvar spirit, large ensemble, women's voices dominant, tragedy and comedy woven into a single fabric. 

One detail gleams with particular poetry: Elsa's profession as advertising director mirrors Almodóvar's own early career selling image and desire, before he turned that vocabulary toward more profound forms of storytelling. In choosing to examine a woman who uses work as armour against feeling, he may be examining something of his own compulsions, his own relationship to creation as both salvation and camouflage. 

The film will likely follow the festival circuit, Venice, where Almodóvar won his most prestigious prize, seems a natural destination, before arriving in theatres as spring begins to thaw winter's grip. How fitting for a film called Bitter Christmas to bloom in March, when grief's long winter finally yields to something warmer, when fiction and life, having tangled themselves inextricably, might finally find a way to coexist.