The splendid Carmen Maura suffers nobly as a cleaning lady heroine who stays at the calm centre - even when having violent casual sex with a martial artist or bludgeoning her husband to death - of the chaos of a bizarre block of flats.
Among lesser weirdnesses are a plan to forge Hitler's memoirs, a calmly businesslike transaction whereby Maura sells her young son to a gay dentist, a chattily benevolent hooker in the next apartment, a loony mother-in-law with a pet lizard, some unusually afflicted psychiatric patients, a teenage drug dealer who represents semi-normality and the usual mock-commercials.
The nearest Almodovar could ever get to Brookside or Mrs. Dale's Diary, this is a warped soup in which the most degenerate kinks are seen as pleasantly normal. An enormously winning, wilfully wicked treat.