Pedro Almodóvar's 20th feature film is both unmistakably Almodóvar, and unlike anything he's done before. He's taken three stories by Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro and transformed them into a fascinating story about a woman trying to solve the most painful mystery of her life: why her estranged teenage daughter disappeared from her life.

As his film slips back and forth in time, Almodóvar uses two different actresses to play the haunted Julieta. In the present, in Madrid, she learns from a chance encounter that her daughter Antia is alive, married and living in Italy. This revelation triggers memories of the fateful, death-haunted train ride in 1985 when she met Antia's handsome fisherman father on a train, and her daughter was conceived.

Propelled by Alberto Iglesias's brooding, Hitchcockian score, Julieta comes together like a jigsaw puzzle, each fragment in time filling in a blank space in the riddle. How did the joy and promise of youth turn into the guilt and regret of middle age? And can there be at least one more chapter, bringing reconciliation?