Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the movie. Its a good movie but it quickly goes off the rails.

Geraldine Chaplin (who co wrote the script along with Carlos Saura and Rafael Azcone) plays a woman name Teresa who is in a passionless marriage.

Per Occarson plays Pedro, the husband who is runs a auto manufacturing plant and not very interested in wife.

She receives furniture that once belong to her late parents. After she received the furniture she starts to act strange.

One weekend alone, they participate in role playing games and things get looney fast. I found the role playing games outlandish. I laughed at some of the scenes thinking if alcohol was involved in the writing process. Also, I suspect some of the role playing ideas came from Chaplin. If that is the case, she must be quiet the character.

I do wonder if Saura referenced his first marriage. There were some elements from Chaplin's past in the film, such as she attend an all girls Catholic boarding school and had a stern father.

What message Saura wanted to convey gets lost by the outrageous role playing scenes. (I have read that one of the messages of the movie was about Chaplin having a difficult time in breaking away from her father's shadow)

What saved the film was the acting by Chaplin and Occarson. They did great and they worked very well together.

Also, this was the one and only time Chaplin co wrote a screenplay with Saura.

If you want to watch a bizarre film where a person gets aroused by having crawdads crawling all over them. Then this movie is for you!

In their huge Brutalist mansion, Per Oscarsson and Geraldine Chaplin send the servants away and hide from visitors to role play.

It's a movie I watched through the end to see if there was any point to it other than the apparent co-dependency of the characters. In the end I could not find any other major object, other than a possible political theme about the relationship of Spaniard with the Franco government. That, however, is both too obvious and too rarified to have any real sense of serious subtext. Just as there are film critics who see fascism in every German movie from 1919 through the end of the Second World War, you can shoehorn every serious Spanish movie of the second half of the Franco era into political commentary. Does the fact that Miss Chaplin and the movie's director, Carlos Saura, were in a twelve-year relationship that ended about 1980 have any bearing on this movie? Quite possibly, but it's too personal for an audience not hipped to that fact.

Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin) is haunted by childhood trauma. She and her husband Pedro (Per Oscarsson) live in an isolated mansion. He's a successful auto executive, but at home, his wife is deteriorating. He starts playing her 'games' and it gets surreal.

This is a Spanish arthouse film. It's a little weird and it's a little slow. I would prefer a more isolated home with nobody other than the two leads. It's somewhat interesting to devolve into her father's relationship with her. That seems to have the juiciest possibilities. They do keep detouring into weirdness and they're not always compelling. I don't see pretending to be a dog as anything other than wondering if the pork chops are raw. I am interested in the crawfish for one reason. I don't know if people ate crawfish back then. I'm sure the Spanish did. They had to get them from somewhere. Did middle America other than Louisiana eat crawfish?

I expected more surrealism. It seems to be a lack of technical know-how or budget. There is a missed opportunity to go all out. Basically, a lot of this is these two actors playing around on a stage play. The father figure could do a great reveal, but this movie is a bit unfocused. It's trying to be profound and edgy. This has its moments.