Premiering in the competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “Bitter Christmas” (“Amarga Navidad”) introduces a thrilling concept with the potential for a fascinating commentary on the ethics of fictionalizing reality. The film attempts to define the limits of what an artist can exploit for the sake of a good story, but its poor execution prevents any message from fully landing.

“Bitter Christmas” initially follows film director and writer Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who is suffering from an excruciating migraine. As intense violin plays and thunder crashes, director Pedro Almodóvar opens the film with a deep suspense surrounding Elsa’s mysterious pain. When she arrives at the hospital, she explains that she once shot a film there in which a character dies in the room Elsa has been assigned. Convinced that cinema might be premonitory, Elsa requests the room next door instead.

This anxiety introduces the film’s central idea. Soon after, “Bitter Christmas” traces narcissistic writer Raúl’s (Leonardo Sbaraglia) construction of Elsa’s story. Gaining inspiration from his assistant of several years, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Raúl pulls tragedies from her life and workshops them into the script. As he writes, the audience watches these scenes materialize in real time. The narrative constantly shifts between Raúl’s reality and the fictional story he is creating — one that interweaves Elsa’s past and present. Within the fictional timeline, Elsa herself also writes a film exploiting her best friend’s marital problems. “Bitter Christmas” thus becomes a film-within-a-film-within-a-film.

The film’s ambitious premise is matched by its visual style. Costumes are flashy and colorful, with characters adorned in Prada sunglasses and bright sweaters. Sets glow with hyper-saturated reds and blues, and as Raúl writes, his words appear across the screen in bold red font.

This vivid direction makes the resulting melodrama especially disappointing. Rather than deepening the film’s originality, many plot points feel deliberately clichéd. Raúl repeatedly workshops his screenplay by imposing tragic scenarios onto his characters, testing which versions work most dramatically. Yet this framing massively trivializes the issues — including suicide and cancer — the film aims to confront. Though perhaps intended as a subversive critique of a writer’s exploitation of trauma, the irony falls flat, and “Bitter Christmas” ends up suffering from the exact flaw it condemns.

Moreover, Raúl’s storyline alone would have been sufficient to communicate the film’s critique of artistic exploitation. The additional layer of Elsa’s screenplay feels unnecessarily self-referential, pushing “Bitter Christmas” into excessive metafiction.

However, the film’s fatal flaw is its use of Raúl’s unfinished screenplay as an excuse to leave nearly every narrative thread unresolved. By the end, most conflicts remain emotionally and structurally incomplete. As a result, the film carries little emotional weight and struggles to arrive at any meaningful philosophical conclusion. A film doesn’t necessarily need to be emotional or philosophical to succeed, but “Bitter Christmas” isn’t entertaining enough to compensate for the absence of both.

“Bitter Christmas” constructs a clever loophole for mediocrity: It verbalizes the faults of Raúl’s screenplay as though naming them exempts the film itself from criticism. Instead, this self-awareness only makes the experience more frustrating, since the filmmakers clearly understand what could have been improved. The concept is exciting, the colors are vibrant, the music is lively, and humor is scattered throughout. But as a meaningful film, “Bitter Christmas” ultimately fails.

—Staff writer Anat Goldstein can be reached at [email protected].