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Matador Movie Review

Matador is a 1986 Spanish erotic thriller film directed by Pedro Almodovar and starring Antonio Banderas, Assumpta Serna and Nacho Martinez. It’s a flawed, but undeniably memorable, provocative thriller.

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“First they rape you,

then you have to talk about it!“

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Banderas plays a naïve boy so perversely desperate to impress that he attempts to rape Diego’s girlfriend. He fails, but turns himself in regardless, also confessing to a series of murders he’s recently seen in psychic visions. A lawyer steps in to defend him, but the police are unconvinced Angel is the real culprit. This is one of those more graphic and sexually exhibitionist movies that Almodovar usually made in the beginning of his career with ‘Tie Me Up!’ being rather similar in its intentions.

Here in this story, murder and sex are co-dependent. Almodovar cleverly depicted how closely tied together sex and perversions are to murder, especially when it comes to psychopaths and serial killers. The villains in this film are over-the-top, but they work in the context of the story as they are quite memorable to follow in their disturbing quest.

Antonio Banderas is actually the good guy here. He’s excellent as always and quite memorable, but his character is somewhat underwritten. He basically plays a psychic that can read the minds of these two killers, thus eventually alerting the police about their plans. This was an intriguing conceit, but the problem here lies in execution. This psychic ability of his is vital to the plot, but it’s treated in such an ordinary fashion, which felt rather odd and underutilized.

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Assumpta Serna and Nacho Martinez are the standouts as their characters make this movie what it is, which is positively unhinged. She is the more theatrical villain of the two, but still such a memorable presence. Martinez was particularly effective at portraying Diego’s fetishistic obsessions, which ended up being his undoing.

Almodovar has always been one of the most provocative filmmakers when it comes to the subject of sex. He treats human sexuality as a complex thing that is also morally ambiguous and ever-adapting. Here, the idea is that most of the serial killers’ actions are provoked by fetishism, which is an audacious, but honest notion. The psychological elements made this movie quite interesting while the extreme graphic nature to the sex scenes was both uncomfortable and undeniably memorable.

Matador is also quite stylistically accomplished. The film’s directing is superb while the editing is phenomenal, especially in the scenes where the two male characters watch violence on television and are aroused by it. These sequences were so well shot and quite disturbing in their feel. But the film is also surprisingly lightweight and fun, which contrasted with the serious, dark underpinnings of the story for better and for worse.

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The inclusion of authentic Spanish cultural elements was also a terrific one as bullfighting has never looked so sexy and so provocative. The sensual feel of the entire film is very European as no American movie has ever been this sexy. The crime scenes are very good, but even more could have been done with them to make them more exciting. The score is quite diverse and fitting the action on screen while the brisk pacing made it an involving watch. The dialogue is another highlight as it’s delightfully playful.