Matador 1986

Diego Montes, [Nacho Martínez], is a former bullfighter who has been pushed into early retirement after a brutal goring, yet he finds a troubling kind of sexual gratification by watching slasher films. Among the students in Diego’s bullfighting class is Ángel [Ángel, Antonio Banderas], a diffident young man who struggles with a crippling vertigo. During a vertigo episode in the practice ring, Ángel experiences a vivid vision: a woman killing a man during sex, her ornamental silver hairpin stabbing at the base of the neck as a matador ends a bull’s life. This haunting image unsettles him, and it becomes a thread that weaves through the spiral of his life.

After class, Diego probes Ángel about his sexuality, suggesting he might be inexperienced with women. Ángel insists he is not gay, and vows to prove himself. That same day, Ángel shadows Diego’s girlfriend, Eva [Eva Cobo], to a dimly lit alley, attempting a reckless rape. Eva resists, slapping him in contempt when his humiliation surfaces; in the aftermath, a muddy crack in the ground and Eva’s bloody cheek frighten Ángel, who faints at the sight of blood.

The guilt and shame drive Ángel to seek help, telling his domineering mother that he needs psychotherapy. A rigid mother, who belongs to Opus Dei, drives him toward mass and confession as the price of remaining under her roof. A priest’s words do little to quell his fears, so Ángel goes to the police to confess to rape. Eva arrives at the station to report a different stance, describing that Ángel ejaculated without intercourse and choosing not to press charges. The exchange leaves Ángel humiliated and exposed, and the detective senses a more troubling pattern when he notices photos of dead men bearing the same wound Ángel described.

As the investigation deepens, Ángel reveals a darker truth: he believes he has killed the men in the photos, and he leads the detective to two missing women—students of Diego—buried on Diego’s property. The detective wrestles with questions of how Ángel could have buried the bodies on Diego’s land without Diego’s knowledge, and notes an apparent alibi for one murder, along with Ángel’s fainting reaction at blood.

Meanwhile, Eva, still deeply in love with Diego, remains in thrall to him. When they have sex, Diego asks Eva to lie perfectly still and pretend to be dead; she complies without hesitation, a chilling detail that underscores the dangerous dynamic between them.

Into this tangled web enters María Cardenal, María Cardenal, Diego’s sharp-witted lawyer who wears the same ornamental hairpin Ángel saw in his vision. María suspects Diego’s hand in the two women’s deaths and schemes to steer Ángel away from confessing further. She arranges for Ángel to see a psychiatrist and urges him to stop confessing to the murders. A dangerous game unfolds as María, aware that Diego is stalking her, lures him to a secluded warehouse and kisses him in a charged moment, their bodies tinged with the killer’s instinct they each share. Diego, ever perceptive, grasps María’s hand as she readies a hairpin for harm, and in that instant both acknowledge the dark urge that binds them. María then leads Diego to her remote home, where she has amassed memorabilia of his past killings, a macabre shrine to the career he once imagined for himself.

That tense night, Eva, who has been listening in, overhears the plan and realizes the double danger: María and Diego are both serial killers, and she confronts María, warning her away from Diego and threatening to expose their secret. María scoffs at the threat, arguing that Eva could never satisfy Diego in the long run. Undeterred, María presses ahead with the plan.

As the drama spirals toward its climactic convergence, Ángel’s psychiatrist contacts the detective, reporting that Ángel has sensed danger to Diego and María in a trance. Ángel’s abilities—described here as psychic or heightened intuition—lead the police, Eva, and the psychiatrist toward María’s house. An eclipse marks the moment, heightening the sense of fate as they arrive. They burst in to find María and Diego together, both dead: María, in the very act of stabbing Diego with her hairpin at the base of the neck, has also shot herself in the mouth with a pistol, a final, predatory act that seals their intertwined destinies.

In the aftermath, Ángel laments that he could not save Diego, while the detective somberly notes that the killers appear strangely content with their destruction. The film closes on a stark, unsettling note, leaving a trail of violence, desire, and guilt that lingers long after the final shot.