Cross-media picks for Pedro Almodóvar fans — films, series, games and books in the same vein.
These picks share a preoccupation with desire that disrupts — passion that arrives uninvited, reshapes lives, and refuses to resolve neatly. Across Baby, Dark Habits, Labyrinth of Passion, and beyond, women in particular navigate sexuality, shame, and social expectation with a mixture of desperation and defiant humour. The tone oscillates between melodrama and dark comedy, the settings between Madrid, São Paulo, and Mexico City. What holds it all together is emotional excess treated with intelligence rather than judgment.
Film
Baby
A young man adrift in São Paulo finds unexpected connection in the margins of society, raw and unsentimental.
Film
Malta
A methodical woman's controlled life cracks open through secret encounters — desire as the one unbudgeted expense.
Film
Dark Habits
A cabaret singer takes refuge from the law in a convent of fallen women — transgression and unlikely sanctuary.
Film
Sex, Shame and Tears 2
A reunion of old lovers and sexual rivals revisits the domestic battleground of desire twenty years on.
Film
Erótica, a Fêmea Sensual
A woman's sexuality persists through disfigurement and grief — taboo desire treated with unflinching directness.
Film
Hibla
Two women shaped by divergent fates collide, their friendship and rivalry tangled up with desire and abandonment.
Film
Labyrinth of Passion
Outrageous characters chase love through Madrid in a gleefully chaotic comedy of desire and misfiring identities.
Film
L'immoralità
An 11-year-old girl, a fugitive killer, and an oversexed mother — a twisted triangle with a deadly centre.
Series
De Vuelta al Barrio
A widowed father and an old flame rediscover each other — a warm soap about love interrupted and resumed.
Series
Wounded Past
A romance severed by class and a powerful family resurfaces years later, raw feeling pitted against cold calculation.
Series
And the World May End
A marriage of intense passion and devastating betrayal — love and destruction cycling through each other without resolution.
Series
Os Maias
A forbidden love and a family torn apart across generations — melodrama on an operatic, tragic scale.
Series
The Time in Between
A Spanish dressmaker reinvents herself as a spy during civil war — resourceful femininity navigating violent, masculine power.
Series
Tempo de Viver
A mother and daughter at war — one suffering, one ruthlessly climbing — bound only by blood and mutual destruction.
Series
La Femme Desperado
Women inside three couples negotiate desire, ambition, and consequence — domestic life as both prison and battlefield.
Series
História de Amor
A woman's quiet strength carries her family through abandonment and crisis, warm feeling mixed with sharp social observation.
Game
a new life.
A short, intimate game about love's capacity to wound — five endings for a question without a clean answer.
Game
Karma: The Dark World
A surveillance state controls minds with drugs in alt-1984 East Germany — oppressive power over interior life.
Game
The Suffering: Ties That Bind
Inner demons made literal haunt a man through a city like a prison — guilt and violence as atmosphere.
Game
Variable Barricade
A woman besieged by absurd marriage proposals navigates desire and family expectation with comic exasperation.
Game
The Fruit of Grisaia
Young people isolated behind walls carry hidden traumas — the academy as hothouse for secrets that can't stay buried.
Game
3072 AD
Bondage and power in a far-future RPG — desire and control made into explicit genre mechanics.
Game
Simulador de KASINÃO no Sabadaço
A loose, carnivalesque simulation that trades in excess and crowd energy — pure id as game loop.
Game
A Lenda do Herói
A knight's colourful platform odyssey with original music — playful, vivid, and cheerfully inexplicable.
Book
Así empieza lo malo
A young assistant drawn into a film director's private shame discovers how desire corrodes even the most elegant façade.
Book
The Spaniard's Marriage Demand
A Spanish director's charm blinds a woman to his manipulation — romantic enthralment with a cold morning-after reckoning.
Book
The Japanese Screen
A whirlwind romance ends on a flimsy pretext, and the woman left behind refuses to accept a tidy explanation.
Book
El tiempo mientras tanto
Women waiting on love to arrive or return — romantic longing as the quiet engine of otherwise ordinary lives.
Book
אותו הים
A widower and his circle reassemble after loss — grief, friendship, and the slow, awkward resumption of living.
Book
Delia's Heart
A Mexican woman crossing worlds to protect someone she loves — loyalty tested by borders, class, and dangerous secrets.
Book
Tuya
A portrait of gender violence and marital breakdown told from inside the wreckage — unflinching, claustrophobic, true.
Book
La reina sin espejo
A stabbed journalist, a literary husband, and a world of vanities — passion crime wrapped in elegant, dangerous society.
Start with the films Dark Habits and Labyrinth of Passion, which share his taste for transgression and dark comedy, or the TV series The Time in Between, a sharp drama about a resilient Spanish woman navigating war and reinvention.
Así empieza lo malo is the most direct match — set in 1980s Madrid, it centres on a film director with a secret shame; Tuya offers the darker domestic angle, a brutal portrait of gender violence and marital collapse.
a new life. is the closest in spirit: a compact, emotionally direct story about love and hurt with multiple endings. Variable Barricade brings the comic-romantic chaos of a woman fending off unwanted suitors.