General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Kika

Kika is a 1993 Spanish-French comedy film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, his tenth feature, starring Verónica Forqué as a makeup artist whose life is invaded by her lover, her maid's criminal brother, and a tabloid-television host who films her assault.¹^•² It was produced by Almodóvar's company El Deseo with the French firm Ciby 2000, released in Spain on 25 October 1993, and certified as not recommended for audiences under 18.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay and story), his tenth film¹^•²
Production	El Deseo, S.A. (Spain, 80%) and Ciby 2000 (France, 20%)¹
Release	25 October 1993 in Spain; rated not recommended for audiences under 18¹
Runtime and format	114 minutes; 35 mm Eastmancolor, widescreen³^•⁴
Spanish box office	3,042,349.18 € gross and 1,038,568 admissions¹
Awards	Goya for Best Actress (Verónica Forqué); eight Goya nominations in total⁵
Filming	10 May to 5 August 1993, in Madrid and Los Santos de la Humosa⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Kika (Verónica Forqué) is an optimistic, talkative cosmetologist. She is called to the mansion of Nicholas (Peter Coyote), an American writer, to make up the corpse of his stepson Ramón (Àlex Casanovas); the young man, who was in a cataleptic (a trance-like rigid state resembling death; he's alive, not dead) state triggered by his mother's suicide rather than dead, revives under her attentions, and the two become lovers and live together.³^•⁶ Kika also maintains an affair with Nicholas, Ramón's stepfather.³

Around the couple gather other intruders. Kika's maid Juana (Rossy de Palma), secretly in love with her, shelters her brother Pablo (Santiago Lajusticia), a porn actor who has escaped from prison; Pablo breaks into Kika's bedroom while she sleeps and rapes her at knifepoint.⁶^•⁷ The crime is witnessed by Andrea Scarface (Victoria Abril), host of the tabloid reality program "Today's Worst" ("Lo peor del día"), who records events with a camcorder attached to her head and is more concerned with catching the assault on camera than with helping.³^•⁷ The broadcast of the recording makes Kika the involuntary protagonist of a reality show.⁶

Genesis and production

Almodóvar began shooting the film in Madrid on 10 May 1993, according to his own account published in El País the following day. He wrote that he had changed the title more times than for any previous film before returning to the provisional first choice, Kika. He described writing the character for his own amusement, as a detox, and said he wanted to recover "the fresh breath of comedy" for his life and his cinema; the story, he wrote, begins as vaudeville and ends in a perverse way.⁸ In the same article he contrasted the film with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: where that film showed an idyllic city, in Kika the city is an aggressive hell in which men do not abandon women but lie to them, spy on them and, if it comes to it, kill them.⁸

Crew and design. Alfredo F. Mayo was the director of photography and José Salcedo the editor.⁴ The costume designer was José María de Cossío, with a special collaboration from Gianni Versace; Victoria Abril's wardrobe was by Jean-Paul Gaultier.² The soundtrack includes Enrique Granados' "Danza Española Número 5", performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Ataulfo Argenta, and "Se nos rompió el amor" sung by Fernanda y Bernarda.⁹ The cast also includes Anabel Alonso as Amparo, Bibi Andersen, Jesús Bonilla, Karra Elejalde, Manuel Bandera, Charo López, Francisco Caballero, Mónica Bardem, and Joaquín Climent.¹

Genre mixing and themes

Almodóvar described himself as "a born eclectic" for whom mixture and impurity were natural, and said that in Kika the coexistence of different genres was more explicit and conscious than ever, a quality that had created difficulties with Spanish critics while being the quality most praised by foreign ones.² A later account of the screenplay's development describes the film moving from a "crazy, vaudevillian comedy" toward a genre-less collage mixing black comedy, tragedy, thriller, jealousy, revenge, childhood traumas and serial killers, set in an abstract, oppressive city.² Movistar's catalog characterizes the film as a parody of the reality shows fashionable in the 1990s.¹⁰ The Academy Museum's program notes describe it as reflecting on sexual violence, the media and the paradoxes of desire, and call it, at the time, the most controversial film of Almodóvar's career.¹¹

Reception

The film earned 1,038,568 admissions in Spain.¹ Verónica Forqué won the 1993 Goya for Best Actress, and the film received eight Goya nominations, including Best Supporting Actress for Rossy de Palma, Best Production Direction for Esther García, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Special Effects and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.⁵

Critical response was divided. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 59% Tomatometer from 17 reviews and a 70% audience score.¹² The Washington Post's Desson Howe called it a glossified, cluttered parody of Almodóvar's earlier obsessions, while describing the rape scene, in which Kika keeps up a chatty patter of protest, as "quintessential Almodovar".⁷ Time Out's review acknowledged the film's reputation as "Almodóvar's flop" and the indignation over the rape scene, but judged it a return to form after High Heels, praising Forqué as brilliant and Andrea Scarface's true-crime show as the source of the film's funniest moments.¹³ A 1994 El País television review called the film a failed attempt to create a new genre from comedy, thriller and melodrama, singling out Rossy de Palma's maid as the one element that truly worked.¹⁴

Scholarship on Spanish reception records that the press dissected the film while fusing the author with his work, engaging in ad hominem attacks on the director's public persona; only a handful of articles, including one by the Fotogramas critic Daniel Monzón and a column by the novelist Eduardo Mendicutti in El Mundo, defended it.¹⁵ Later criticism has read the film's genre play as satire: Ana María Sánchez-Arce argues that Kika draws on the thriller, slasher films and pornography to send up socially accepted links between love and violence, and that criticism focused on its representation of violence against women misses this satirical intent.¹⁶ A SensaCine retrospective positions the film as a turning point at which Almodóvar recognized the need to reinvent himself and progressively clean up his style in subsequent work.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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