Awash in color, feminine psychodrama and heightened emotion, “Julieta” is a classic Pedro Almodovar film, or, more accurately, a classicized version of the Almodovar films his fans have come to adore.

Adapted from three short stories from Alice Munro's “Runaway” collection, this mother-daughter head trip revisits familiar terrain from the filmmaker who gave us the ecstatically lurid melodramas “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “All About My Mother.” But adapting his temperament to match Munro's signature restraint, Almodovar tones down his usual over-the-topness in “Julieta,” which owes as much to the sleek, moody thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock as it does to the supersaturated extravagance of Douglas Sirk.

The film begins as the title character, a chic middle-aged classics professor living in Madrid, is preparing to move to Portugal with her dashing husband, Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti). When Julieta encounters a friend of her daughter, Antia, from whom she has been estranged for several years, she makes the instinctive decision to stay put in the city. Julieta moves back to the apartment where she and Antia lived together, recapitulating the past as a way of understanding how their lives grew apart and embarking on a mission to knit them back together.

Nodding to the movies and telenovelas that he's always loved, Almodovar tells the ensuing story, much of it told in flashback, with well-calibrated suspense and captivating brio, interrogating notions of time, doppelgangers and fate with his characteristically fastidious attention to color and detail. With a palette dominated by shades of red and blue, partly filmed on the romantic seaside of Galicia, where Julieta and Antia's early life together was spent, “Julieta” is a nonstop visual feast, its design elements alone providing welcome escape from the dreary world. Almodovar has even assembled some familiar faces from his informal repertory company of actors, most notably Rossy de Palma, here donning a frizzy wig to play a housekeeper who bears more than a passing resemblance to the forbidding Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca.”

Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith — who is explicitly referenced here — may provide the most obvious inspirational subtext for “Julieta,” but Almodovar makes their most familiar conventions his own, most notably in his ideas for casting the doubles who populate his film. The moment when Julieta, alternately played by Emma Suarez in middle age and Adriana Ugarte as her younger self, transforms from a young woman to an older one is just one of many masterstrokes in a story whose own identity slips from the slow burn of an erotic thriller to a far deeper, more wrenching study of parental loss, self-recrimination and grief.

Suarez is particularly affecting as a woman on the verge, not of a breakdown, but of being engulfed by absence. At its most superficially enjoyable, “Julieta” is a mystery story propelled by the kinds of coincidence and catastrophe that Almodovar might have once mined for maximum camp value.

Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It's no surprise that “Julieta” is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.