Benigno (Camara) and Marco (Grandinetti) become friends because they have both fallen in love with women who now lie, side by side, in comas ? in all likelihood, forever. It's hardest on Marco. He has no idea what to feel or what to do. "Talk to her," advises Benigno, simply, and he certainly follows his own advice: he's a qualified and dedicated nurse who talks to his beloved, Alicia (Watling), night and day. Perhaps he talks to her a little too much. Perhaps everything he does is a little too much. And perhaps he's a little too comfortable with the fact that she's in a coma and can't talk back.

Where is this story going? In the slow and almost formless introduction it appears to be going nowhere much, but stay with it: in the end we're given an involving tale with a shape so lovely that you'd swear there's a moral in there somewhere, although I'll be damned if I know what it is. Almodóvar has lost none of his flair for the beautifully grotesque

"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom," wrote C.A. Lejeune in The Observer (the newspaper the 'peeping tom' of the title says he works for), back in 1960. She was perhaps Britain's most highly regarded film critic and her review was kinder than many. "The sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing," another critic called it. "From its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil," wrote a third.

It's hard to see what inspired such loathing. There's almost no gore. Serial killer Mark Lewis (Böhm) is creepy, but also sort of sweet: although we see him attack and kill a woman in the very first scene (he stabs his victims with a blade attached to his 16mm camera; he likes to say he's working on a documentary), we don't want him to be guilty, and we spend the whole film hoping against hope that his love for the young woman he's boarding with (Massey) will redeem him.

Nowadays all critics (give or take) love Peeping Tom; they claim it's loaded with sophisticated references to voyeurism, photography, seeing, spying, and blindness. I suppose they're right. But I still think it's primarily a sad, tender story about a serial killer ? a reminder that depraved monsters are human, and have feelings, too