Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Here's the thing about watching a film with a towering reputation: sometimes it just doesn't land for you, and you spend the whole runtime wondering what you're missing. That's where I found myself with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I wanted to love it. I really did. The visuals, the performances, the sheer nerve of the whole thing, it all screams "classic." But by the time the credits rolled, I felt strangely untouched. Admiring something and enjoying it are two very different experiences, and this one gave me plenty of the former and almost none of the latter.

Pedro Almodóvar is clearly operating at full throttle here. The colours are extraordinary, saturated and loud, practically vibrating off the screen. The music swells and stabs at exactly the right moments. The women at the centre of it all are emotional, chaotic, and utterly committed to the operatic register the film demands. There's drugged gazpacho, runaway taxis, mistaken identities, and enough romantic devastation to fuel an entire season of a telenovela. As a piece of filmmaking, it's bold and assured. You can feel the confidence behind every frame.

And yet. The pacing felt off to me, the jokes didn't land the way I suspect they're supposed to, and the characters, deliberately exaggerated as they are, came across as exhausting rather than endearing. I kept waiting for the moment where everything clicked into place, where the farce would tip over into something that actually grabbed me emotionally. It never quite arrived. There's a particular brand of campy, high-emotion surrealism that Almodóvar has made entirely his own, and I think you need to be on his wavelength from the off to really surrender to it. I wasn't. Maybe I'm just not the right audience for this one.

It reminded me a little of my experience with Pacifiction (2022), another film I could see was doing something genuinely distinctive, something that clearly worked for a lot of people, but that I personally found myself at arm's length from throughout. Sometimes a film's logic is its own, and if you're not already tuned to its frequency, no amount of goodwill gets you there.

What I won't do is call Women on the Verge bad, because it's clearly not. It's smart, beautifully constructed, and you can see exactly why it matters in the history of Spanish cinema, and in Almodóvar's own career in particular. The craft is never in question. The performances are committed and alive. Carmen Maura, in the lead, is magnetic even when the film itself was failing to hold my attention. There's real wit in the script, even if the humour kept bouncing off me rather than sinking in.

I think this is one of those films where my honest response is: respect fully earned, enjoyment genuinely lost in translation. It's a three-star film for me, and I'm comfortable with that, because those three stars reflect something real. I can see the quality. I can appreciate the boldness. But appreciation isn't the same as love, and I'd rather be straight about that than pretend I was swept away when I wasn't.

If you're an Almodóvar devotee, or someone who grew up watching melodrama and knows how to let it wash over you, there's every chance this will be exactly the riot it's supposed to be. Come in on its terms, and it'll probably reward you. I just couldn't find the door.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1988  | Watched: 2025-09-08

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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