This article analyses how Madrid is pictured like a chimaera in the Spanish cinema at the end of the 20th century. For the protagonists in the films studied, Madrid is both a screen on which they project their dreams and a monstrous figure capable of swallowing them and against which they have to fight. In a parallel step, film directors are inspired by the real city, sometimes fantasized, sometimes nightmarish. In this ambivalent vision of the metropolis, the point of view adopted is fundamental and many films are built on a double perspective embodied by couples of characters formed by a «knight» in search of an ideal and his guide who connects him to the real world.