They Think It's All Over

The Anatomy of a Hostage Romance

I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with *Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!*—and maybe that unease is the point. Seeing Pedro Almodóvar’s 1990 provocation now feels like grabbing a live wire. It’s a romantic comedy where the “meet-cute” is a man storming into a woman’s apartment, tying her to a bed, and matter-of-factly telling her he’s going to make her fall in love with him. You keep waiting for the usual thriller gears: the escape attempt, the punishment, the cathartic payback. Almodóvar refuses that comfort and heads somewhere messier.



After the international, crowd-pleasing success of *Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown*, he could’ve played it safe. Instead he made a movie that sparked such a moral freakout in the U.S. it helped push the NC-17 rating into existence. (And yes, the irony is hard to miss: censors clutched their pearls over a quick, cheeky bathtub gag with a mechanical scuba diver more than they did over the whole “woman held captive” premise.) Visually it’s pure candy—saturated reds, loud blues, that bright pop-art Madrid look. What’s underneath, though, is grim and stubborn.

Antonio Banderas plays Ricky, newly out of a psychiatric hospital, as a frightening blend of delusion and childlike sincerity. He’s disturbingly effective. His posture droops, his eyes look wide and needy even while he’s tightening ropes around her wrists. Ricky isn’t performed like a movie monster; he’s more like a stray dog who can also do terrible things. He truly believes that if he fixes the plumbing and brings home the comfiest gag he can find, she’ll understand it as love.



Victoria Abril, as Marina—the former porn star turned mainstream actress trapped in this situation—has an impossible assignment: make something like Stockholm syndrome feel emotionally legible. For huge stretches she’s immobilized, so the acting has to live in the small stuff. Watch what happens when she can’t move: the shallow breathing, the jaw working against the tape, the eyes doing all the work—terror, fatigue, and then, unbelievably, a flicker of pity. Her shift doesn’t arrive in a big speech. It slips in after Ricky comes back to the apartment beaten bloody by local thugs. She takes in his busted face and recognizes a kind of damage that rhymes with her own past with addiction.

Whether that pivot lands is really about how much you can stomach Almodóvar’s particular irony. Roger Ebert famously bounced off this era of his work, writing, "Almodovar's polarities are so perfectly lined up in opposition to my own that it is quite possible for one of his movies to shoot right through my brain without striking a single cell". I understand the feeling. The film keeps flirting with a line it maybe shouldn’t, smearing the boundary between captivity horror and screwball farce.



I walked away feeling a little grimy, unsure if I’d seen a sharp takedown of male entitlement or a glossy fantasy that accidentally feeds it. Ennio Morricone’s score—clever and swelling, echoing Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock moods—only heightens the whiplash. The camera drifts through this candy-colored prison like it’s asking you to swoon at the ropes. I didn’t, but I also can’t deny how compelling it is to watch the movie try.