I rented it the first day it was out, and liked it a lot, but it's INTENSE. I have liked more of Almodovar's films than I've disliked. Thought provoking, always playing with your expectations, and the cinematography is always strikingly beautiful, each frame a perfect composition full of intense color, not unlike Kubric (but unlike Kubric he doesn't populate his films with two dimensional comic book characters and automatons). Interesting that he muted his usual exuberent color pallet for the somber mood of this one. Banaderas was great as the mad doctor, I sympathized with his pain and loss while being repelled by him in every other way; his "falling in love" with his victim was totally disturbing, pure delusion while he seemed superficially sane in some ways, calm about it, didn't cackle and gibber and chew the scenerey. I was unsure whether I was going to like it until the end, which I felt was the only fitting outcome. And that's all I'm gonna say about that. I went into it with trepidation but to me it wasn't half as disturbing as BAD EDUCATION, which had a transsexual heroine plotting payback on the priest who molested her when she was a kid; but by the end she was proving to be no righteous heroine but something as bad or worse than the priest. If you don't like heavy or disturbing movies, Almodovar's first hit film (in Spain anyway...) WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN is a hilarious, jaw droppingly outrageous comedy and in my top hundred films of all time...