The film is an outrageous look at love and sex, framed in Madrid of the early 1980s, during the so-called Movida madrileña, a period of sexual adventurousness between the dissolution of Franco's authoritarian regime and the onset of AIDS consciousness.

Sexilia ("Sexi") is a pop star and sex addict; Riza is the gay son of the Emperor of Tiran (a fictional Middle Eastern country).

However, her psychoanalyst, Susana, is far more interested in sleeping with Sexila's father, Doctor de la Peña, a gynecologist specializing in artificial insemination.

Making time in her busy schedule for her laundry, Sexilia meets Queti, a young woman who works in a dry-cleaner owned by her father.

Her mother skipped out on her father a few weeks earlier and the father, who takes Vitapens to stimulate his sex drive and potency, pretends to mistake Queti for her mother and binds her to the bed and rapes her on alternate days, despite the fact that Queti regularly laces his tea with a libido-suppressing chemical called Benzamuro.

Under therapy, Sexilia discovers that Toraya was responsible for both her childhood traumas and her nymphomania in the same incident that made Riza gay.

[1] Produced by Alphaville, a distribution company which from 1979 had four cinemas in central Madrid dedicated to the screening of independent films, Labyrinth of Passion enjoyed a much larger budget, more sophisticated technical resources and more lavish publicity than its predecessor Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980).

[2] "Positively bristles with vibrant colors and a wildly comic sexual energy", wrote Marsha Kinder in Film Comment.

Writing in El Periodico, J. L. Guarner suggested that: "The story is nothing more than a series of episodes, summarily linked, and what we have come to call cinema plays little part in it.

Almodóvar imagined the son of the Shah coming to Madrid and used another key figure in the gossip columns, Princess Soraya, who became Toraya in the film.

"[5] Almodóvar has also suggested that in making Labyrinth of Passion he experienced: "The difficulty of presenting a relationship in a light hearted way when beneath the surface, there lies a certain sadness.

"[4] Making a massive technical improvement on Almodóvar's first feature, Labyrinth of Passion set the tone and style for the films that established his name.

A gallery of colorful characters engages in an amusingly complex plot, which concludes with a taxi-cab race to the airport (reworked in 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

[5] Labyrinth of Passion was made during the golden age of La Movida Madrileña, between 1977 and 1983, and almost all the key figures of the movement—painters, musicians—are part of the large cast.

[8] Depicting the hedonism of underground music venues and gay cruising grounds, the daring script shows Almodóvar's enthusiastic embrace of Spain's newfound freedom of expression.

[8] It ran for ten years on a midnight run at Madrid's Alphaville cinema, but was released in the United States, England, France and Italy only after the success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.