At the beginning of Pedro Almodóvar's Spanish film Talk to Her two men are seated next to each other at a performance of Pina Bausch's Café Müller, a modern dance piece from 1978 set to music by Purcell in which two women in slips move quickly but with somnambulistic helplessness across a café set while a man pushes chairs out of their paths. (The movie ends at a performance of Bausch's 1986 work Masurca Fogo.) Benigno notices that Marco is moved to tears by the performance, which turns out to be symbolic of the movie's own story.

Benigno is a nurse assigned full-time to the care of Alicia, a young dancer who has been in a coma for four years. Benigno seems gay, but is actually a virgin who became obsessed with Alicia before her accident; by luck he's ended up with the job which includes intimate care to keep Alicia's skin and muscles and eyes, etc., from deteriorating. (He learned these spa skills while taking care of his own inert mother.) As he works on Alicia he talks to her as casually as if she were awake and listening with total absorption. He tells her about the Bausch performance, which he attended because she would have been interested, about the silent movies he goes to because she loved them, about Marco, though we're not exactly sure why.

Marco is a middle-aged journalist who sees Lydia, a female bullfighter, on a talk show, and asks to be assigned to interview her. His entrée is that she's plainly desperate about being dumped by a male fellow bullfighter. Marco gets more than an interview, however, after he kills a snake in Lydia's kitchen. It brings them together but also puts a space between them because it reminds Marco of a similar situation with his ex-girlfriend of ten years (whom he got off drugs by taking her back to her parents who then refused to let her see him anymore). Marco weeps at the memory, which Lydia registers. At the ex's wedding Marco feels ready to commit to Lydia; she doesn't get a chance to tell him she's back with her own ex before she's gored by a bull later that day and put in a coma, ending up on the same hospital floor as Alicia. The two men become friends, though Marco is resistant to the idea that there's any point in talking to a comatose woman.