All About My Mother was the first Almodóvar film I saw, and truly no other director since Hitchcock can a name so succinctly be used as an adjective. There is something distinctly Almodóvar in each film that he makes—a trait both unique to each film and consistent across his oeuvre.

From a technical standpoint, All About My Mother features Almodóvar’s typical tricks: bold usage of color, infatuation with interiors and architecture, concern with women’s issues & experience, and the most bizarre pastiche of homage. This is a film about women’s faces. About the artifice of living as a women—in Spain, yes, but ultimately how cruelly honest it is about the Western world in general.

Cecilia Roth plays the ultimate mother, tending to nearly every character in the film at one point or another. The film begins conventionally: the mother-and-son living idyllically in a fatherless state of suspension (Jesus?) and only becomes more complicated. Her pietà unloops as the film progresses, as she swaps Madrid for Barcelona—and Barcelona, such a city made for filmmaking with its melting buildings and mosaic plazas. This film’s mosiac is a tiling of women.

It questions motherhood—what are the gains, the costs of entry. When a husband dies, a wife becomes a widow, but what does a mother become when her child dies? Criminally, we have no word for this.

And the origins of artifice—make-up, the falsity of the theatre, invented pasts and torn photographs, lipsuction & breast augmentation. You think already this must be three films. But this braid is too perfect.

Almodóvar is a striking filmmaker, and like a good storyteller, he grabs you by the lapels, yanks you to him, and then shoves you back into your chair. Everything unravels. Everything falls apart. And beautifully, and for all the right reasons.