Metrograph

Diego (Nacho Martínez), a former matador who’s compulsively masturbating to slasher movies when he’s not teaching the bullfighter’s art, becomes entangled in a web of mystery after one of his students, the timid and sexually inexperienced Ángel (Antonio Banderas), “confesses” to two murders he believes himself to have committed in a vertiginous swoon, opening up a cat-and-mouse game between Diego and his pupil’s lawyer, María (Assumpta Serna), who has some psychosexual peccadillos of her own. A ludicrous spin on the Hitchcockian thriller that’s all the more hysterical for the dead earnestness of the cast’s performances, including Banderas in his first really meaty part in an Almodóvar picture and Carmen Maura as the skittish young man’s somewhat randy psychiatrist.