Matador

A newly restored 4K version of Almodóvar’s 1986 classic, where murder, desire, and the ritual of bullfighting converge in a baroque dance of passion and death.

Diego Montes is a celebrated bullfighter forced into retirement after a catastrophic goring. Nostalgic for the bullring and consumed by anxiety, Montes transfers the choreography of the corrida into the bedroom, murdering lovers at the moment of climax in a desperate search for release. Parallel to this, a law student plagued by vertigo and paralysed by religious guilt confesses to crimes that point to the presence of a mysterious woman with equally lethal desires.

As a criminal lawyer becomes entangled in the case, a spiral of erotic obsession unfolds. The film juxtaposes the ritual beauty of bullfighting with the fatal intimacy of sex, weaving together surrealism, black comedy, and baroque melodrama. A hairpin becomes as deadly as a sword; pleasure and violence mirror one another in scenes staged with both irony and theatrical flair.

At once a dark romance and a twisted thriller, Matador explores the mythic link between Eros and Thanatos – sex and death, desire and destruction – against the backdrop of post-Franco Spain.. The film’s theatrical entanglement of vengeance, obsession, and ritual marks a turning point in Almodóvar’s career: flamboyant, subversive, and unafraid to shock.

This newly restored 4K version premiered in the Classics section of the 2025 Venice Film Festival.