Pablo, a successful gay film director, disappointed in his relationship with his young lover, Juan, concentrates in a new project, a monologue starring his transgender sister, Tina.

Antonio, an uptight young man, falls possessively in love with the director, and in his passion would stop at nothing to obtain the object of his desire.

The film's themes include love, loss, gender, family, sexuality, and the close link between life and art.

Pablo Quintero is a successful gay film and theatrical director whose latest work, The Paradigms of the Mussel, has just been released.

At the play's opening night, Pablo meets Antonio, a young man who has been obsessed with the director since he watched the gay theme film The Paradigms of the Mussel.

The letter makes Antonio fall into a jealous rage, but he has to return to his native Andalusia, where he lives with his domineering German mother.

As he promised, Pablo sends Antonio a letter signed Laura P, the name of a character inspired by his sister in a script he is writing.

Antonio returns to Madrid and, in order to get closer to Pablo who is still in the hospital, seduces Tina who believes his love to be genuine.

I find him too over the top, excessive, unreal... As if he lived in another world... on the other hand [with The Law of Desire, Almodóvar] has achieved what at the outset seemed impossible.

[7] In Cinco Dias Antonio Gutti criticized the film's emphasis on the homosexual as too sustained and felt that Almodóvar's irresistible humor did not appear.

[7] Angel Fernandez Santos in El País considered that the film contained "such an excess of incidents and events that their sheer number neutralizes some of its quality".

In El Periodico, Jorge de Cominges commented that: "Pedro Almodóvar's success is in putting together the different elements of such a wild story.

In a quite brilliant manner he creates characters as impactful as the police detective and his son; and he turns the magnificent Carmen Maura into the most sensual woman you can imagine.

"[full citation needed] Manuel Hidalgo wrote: "The Law of Desire is Pedro Almodóvar's most homogeneous, controlled and finished film".

[7] Pauline Kael in The New Yorker commented: "The film has the exaggerated plot of an absurdist Hollywood romance, and even when it loses its beat (after a murder) there’s always something happening.

[8] In her review for The New York Times Janet Maslin said: "What it lacks in depth, The Law of Desire makes up in surface energy, with a lively cast, a turbulent plot and a textbook-worthy collection of case histories".

[9] Jonathan Rosenbaum from Chicago Reader concluded: "The film bristles with energy and bright interludes before the lugubrious plot takes over…".

David Edelstein in New York magazine called it "a swirling Cri de Coeur [that] explores the conflict within a director between voyeurism and passionate love".

The director also mentioned that it was influenced by the Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s particularly those made by Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder's 1950 Sunset Boulevard, which he called "an epic film with regards to emotion".

There is also the influence of the French writer Jean Cocteau, whose play The Human Voice (La Voix humaine) (1932), is adapted by Pablo Quintero.

The outrageous titles of Pablo's film seem to belong to John Waters' aesthetic universe of pop culture, media, and trash as found in Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977).

Religion and sexual abuse appear in the character of Ada who with Tina makes a cruz de mayo, a makeshift altar that mixes religious and pagan elements.

The scene in which Tina enters her former school where she sang as the soloist at church and confronts Father Constantino, the priest who abused her when she was a boy, formed a partial genesis for Almodóvar's later film Bad Education.

Almodóvar cited American painter Edward Hopper as an inspiration for the way in which his cinematographer Ángel Luis Fernández photographed Madrid.

Tina's revelation of her torrid past to her amnesiac brother, although narrated but not shown, recalls Elizabeth Taylor's outrageous claims in Suddenly, Last Summer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play.

Dmitri Shostakovich's tenth symphony is used for the opening credits and Igor Stravinsky's Tango for Pablo's escape in his car.

Almodóvar chose a version sung by Maysa Matarazzo, a bossa nova artist who enjoyed considerable success.

Central to the film is the song Lo Dudo (I doubt it) a bolero by Los Panchos, a Latin American trio formed in the 1940s.

The Italian romantic song Guarda Che Luna (Look at the Moon), written by Fred Buscaglione, frames the scene by the lighthouse in which Antonio confronts Juan.

The film closes with Dejame recordar (Let me remember), a bolero by Cuban singer and cabaret actor Bola de Nieve.