Film Diary 2011: The Skin I Live In (From The Argus)

Film Diary 2011: The Skin I Live In

11:08am Monday 31st October 2011

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A bit of cinematic catch-up for me, finally - about two months after release - seeing Pedro Almodovar's highly acclaimed thriller The Skin I Live In.

The poster brags about a 'must-keep-secret twist' and whilst I'm not going to spoil anything here I thought it apt to quickly waffle on about the nature of twists in movies. The twist phenomenom was reignited in contemporary cinema by M Night Shyalaman's The Sixth Sense in 1999, and sure enough - for those who didn't see it coming - it has a twist in so much as everything the audience is supposed to have assumed about the film up to a certain point is turned on its head by a sudden revelation. Similar twists occured in other contemporaries such as Fight Club, The Prestige, Secret Window and other Shyalaman films such as The Village. All those films share a moment where our preconceptions are altered or confirmed if we figured it out.

The Skin I Live In, for me, does not have this. That's not to say that the film's narrative doesn't take some interesting turns, but none of them occur in a fashion where your jaw drops and you have to reassess all that has gone before, merely the story unfolds and works best if you know very little about what to expect.

But, for the sake of writing this and the fact you're reading it, I should probably give you a little detail on the film's plot. Antonio Banderas plays plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard who, since a tragic accident wherein his wife was burnt in a wreckage, has been developing a new form of stronger human skin with a patient - Vera (Elena Anaya) - who he has under 24 hour watch, locked in a room of his mansion.

The film is a brilliant and bizarre thriller with commanding performances from both Banderas and Anaya, and Almodovar directs this peculiar tale with a masterful hand, blending the feel of Hitchcock, Cronenberg and Kubrick without it ever feeling derivative. It's an effectively creepy tale, played with the clinical detachment that marked Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, but at the same time Almodovar's flair for human relationships is very much present, however here bubbling away under the surface liable to erupt at any second and the restraint leads to some shocking - but never exploitational - revelations and occurences that often sit somewhere between uncomfortable and humourous!

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