Pedro Almodóvar employs melodrama towards both comedic and heartrending ends in Volver, the director’s new film about mother-daughter relationships, traumatic pasts, female community, and coming clean about recourses made to survive. Masterfully modulated by Almodóvar, who switches tonal gears with a speed and fluidity so attuned that a moment’s distraction will render a subsequent sequence bafflingly unexpected, the film resembles, paradoxically, a screw-ball comedy about female suffering. Starting over the graves of deceased men being ritually cleaned by their surviving wives, daughters, sisters, and family, the movie introduces Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) caring for the tomb of her mother with her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). After returning home, Raimunda’s husband, the sole male character in the film, is unexpectedly murdered in a Hitchcockian scene that queasily toes the line between fraught emotion and absurd comedy. Compounding the murder and its cover-up by Raimunda is the appearance of her deceased mother (Carmen Maura) to her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas), who initially takes the apparition to be a ghost and hides her existence from her sister and niece. With the weak, parasitic, and perverse male expired, the upturning of Raimunda’s life as she makes an impromptu decision to run a local café while the owner is out of town, and the familial awkwardness between the sisters as they each hide things from one another even when their beloved aunt dies and their mother’s good friend Agustina (Blanca Portillo) is diagnosed with cancer, Almodóvar prompts a swirling reconsideration of the current, tenuous relationships between the women and their mysterious, harrowing pasts that are causing so much tension and distress.

While Volver’s tremendous ensemble cast powerfully conjures a communal atmosphere of wavering confidence, interlocking secrets, and eventually cathartic understanding, Almodóvar fails to keep up his film’s energy to match the weaving interplay between his perky and vivaciously searching characters. For a movie that has a fixation on colorful suppressed violence, familial secrets, and almost metaphysically screw-ball appearances, disappearances, hiding and seeking between characters, Volver never seems to muster up the surface liveliness to propel Raimunda back into the past in order to accept her present. It doesn’t help matters that the film starts with a bang, the initial murder and the score by Almodóvar regular Alberto Iglesias slyly conjuring the melodramatic tension of Bernard Herrmann. Perhaps it is the film’s admittedly inspired use of the past as its central motivator, that which underlies all the turmoil and tragicomic drama of the present, but for most of the film’s running time it feels like Volver’s women are just talking about and around their troubles rather than reaching out and vigorously grasping them. This ideal is presented in the film’s first half, with Sole’s hiding of her mother from Raimunda and Raimunda’s hiding of her husband’s body from her daughter exhibiting Almodóvar playing with genre plotting with a cinematic and tonal nimbleness to poke, prod, and reveal each woman’s relationship to men, each other, violence, their mothers, and their memories. But once the initial misunderstandings are cleared up Volver’s narrative runs out of steam, and coasts mostly on the bravura direction of all the actors involved (Almodóvar’s affection for his actors and their characters has never shined as brightly) rather than on the pizzazz or inspiration of the plot or style of the film. In its own way, and perhaps more than it really knows, the film evokes the potency of the way relationships in the past twist, distort, and ultimately complete the same relationships in the present, but it does this through a relative, but disappointing muting of the film’s vivid sense of life.