General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Live Flesh

Live Flesh (Spanish: Carne trémula) is a 1997 drama-thriller directed by Pedro Almodóvar, a Spanish-French co-production loosely adapted from Ruth Rendell's 1986 crime novel of the same name. The film follows Víctor Plaza, a young man imprisoned after an accidental gunshot paralyzes a police officer, and the entangled fates of the cop, the woman both men love, and the officer's wife in post-Franco Madrid.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Pedro Almodóvar, 1997; Spain and France¹
Source	Ruth Rendell's novel Live Flesh (1986), relocated from London to post-Franco Spain²^•³
Screenplay	Pedro Almodóvar, Jorge Guerricaechevarría, Ray Loriga⁴
Principal cast	Liberto Rabal (Víctor Plaza), Francesca Neri (Elena), Javier Bardem (David), Ángela Molina (Clara), José Sancho (Sancho), Penélope Cruz (Isabel Plaza Caballero)⁵
Spanish release	10 October 1997, with international releases through 1998 and 1999¹
Reception	80% Tomatometer from 45 reviews and 86% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 69; IMDb rating 7.3/10 from about 36,000 votes⁶^•⁷^•⁸
Recognition	Nominated for a BAFTA in 1997⁹

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens at Christmas 1970, during the Franco era, when a prostitute played by Penélope Cruz gives birth to a boy on a public bus; the child, Víctor, thereby earns a lifelong free bus pass.⁴^•¹⁰ Twenty years later, after Franco's time is a dim memory, Víctor (Liberto Rabal) calls at the apartment of Elena (Francesca Neri), a wealthy junkie he had met days earlier and fallen for. Expecting her dealer, she lets him in, and the encounter turns into a heated argument.¹⁰^•⁴

Two police officers, the young David (Javier Bardem) and his older colleague Sancho (José Sancho), respond to the noise. In the chaos a gun goes off, and the bullet paralyzes David; Víctor goes to prison.⁶^•¹⁰ Accounts of the interval differ: Rotten Tomatoes' synopsis says six years pass before Víctor leaves jail, while Cineuropa and the International Film Festival Rotterdam synopsis say four years, after which David has become a renowned wheelchair basketball player married to Elena.⁶^•¹^•¹⁰ On release, Víctor begins an affair with Sancho's wife Clara (Ángela Molina) as David and Elena's marriage falls apart, and the destinies of the five begin to cross again.⁶^•¹¹

Adaptation from Rendell's novel

Rendell's novel, first published in 1986, is a psychological thriller about Victor Jenner, a sexual predator who shoots and grievously wounds a police officer and, ten years after his release from prison, falls for the officer's girlfriend.²^•¹² The film keeps the main idea but reworks the plot, characters, setting, narrative temporality, and structure of events.¹³ Where Rendell's story was written and set in London in the early Thatcherite period, the film is set in post-Franco Spain and roots itself in a different culture; a scholarly reading describes the change as turning a novel about a rapist and the consequences of his behavior into a film about an innocent adrift in a world of corruption and decay.³^•¹⁴

The adaptation also shifts the point of view. A Variety review noted that the screen version puts motion and energy into a story that was mostly internalized from Víctor's perspective in Rendell's book.⁷ An academic study of the film identifies its treatment of violence through state-ideological violence under Francoism, institutional police violence, and symbolic violence of gender and masculinity, and reads Almodóvar as subverting certain conventions of film noir.² Almodóvar had tended to choose modest thrillers rather than monumental novels for adaptation; Live Flesh and Thierry Jonquet's Mygale (the basis of The Skin I Live In) are the two crime novels among his literary adaptations.¹⁵^•¹⁶

Production and release

The screenplay is credited to Almodóvar with Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Ray Loriga, with Affonso Beato as cinematographer and José Salcedo as editor. Agustín Almodóvar produced for El Deseo, with CiBy 2000 and France 3 Cinéma as co-producers.⁴^•¹ The film opened in Spain on 10 October 1997 and in France on 29 October 1997, then rolled out across Europe and beyond through 1998 and 1999, reaching the United Kingdom on 15 May 1998.¹ It was shown at the 1997 London and New York film festivals and screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1998.¹¹^•¹⁰

Reported runtimes differ between sources: MoMA, Cineuropa, and streaming listings give 103 minutes, while the Rotterdam festival catalog lists 100 minutes and Rotten Tomatoes and Apple TV list 1 hour 43 minutes.⁴^•¹^•⁶ The American release was rated R for strong sexuality, language, and some drug content.¹⁷

Reception

Critical response was largely positive. Rotten Tomatoes records an 80% Tomatometer from 45 reviews and an 86% audience score; its critics consensus describes the film as a mature melodrama in which Almodóvar works in surprisingly restrained form.⁶ On Metacritic it scored 69, with 12 positive, 6 mixed, and no negative reviews among 18 counted.⁷ Reviewers repeatedly framed it as a turning point: David Denby called it Almodóvar's best movie since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the BFI later described it as the career juncture between his wild early thrillers and the more controlled style of the internationally acclaimed melodramas that began with All About My Mother in 1999.⁷^•⁹ A Screen International review cited by the Melbourne festival read the film's overt politicism and rumination on death, destiny, and redemption as signaling a more mature phase in Almodóvar's work.¹⁸

Almodóvar himself said of the film: "About Live Flesh I can only say that it is the most disquieting film I have ever made and the one that has caused me the most unease."¹⁸ The film was nominated for a BAFTA in 1997.⁹ Among audiences it holds 7.3/10 on IMDb from about 36,000 votes.⁸

Place in Almodóvar's career

Several critics identified Live Flesh as the first time Almodóvar adapted another writer's material, and as a consolidation of themes of obsessive love he had returned to throughout his work.¹⁹ Writing in 2002, Scott Tobias called it a fully realized work and a sustained examination of how betrayal, guilt, revenge, desire, and loss relate to love, ending what he saw as nine years of oscillation between the taboo-busting sex romps of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and Kika and the Sirk-inspired melodrama of High Heels and The Flower of My Secret.¹⁹ The Rotterdam festival catalog noted that the serious subjects of fate, guilt, atonement, and revenge are told with humor but never mockingly, which it described as unusual for Almodóvar.¹⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Erotic thrillers and dramas

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

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