The Skin I Live In

Overview

When a film leaves you standing outside the cinema afterwards gasping for air, you know it has made a deep impact.  The discomfort which Pedro Almodovar's latest film, The Skin I Live In, has imparted upon me is one I will be feeling for some time.

The story follows the rather sinister Dr Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), an eminent plastic surgeon who has been developing an artificial skin in his own laboratory for the last 12 years — a skin which is sensitive to touch and yet resistant to external damage and which could have saved his wife, who was horribly burned in a car accident 12 years earlier. In his idyllic mansion near Toledo in Spain, Ledgard has been experimenting on his own human guinea pig, the enigmatic and elusive Vera (Elena Anaya).   With the collusion of Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who has looked after Ledgard since he was a child, Vera is kept prisoner in an upstairs bedroom, wearing nothing but a flesh-coloured body suit to protect her new skin.

As the movie jumps back and forth through time, the story begins to unfold. There is stunning mise en scene and camerawork, paying homage to cinema of the '40s and '50s, particularly to masters of the film noir genre such as Hitchcock, and a masterfully evocative music score. These provide the audience with various signs, clues and premonitions, gradually revealing the true nature of Dr Ledgard's most unethical experiment and the motives behind it.

Questions of perception and external impressions are central to the film's theme. If you change someone on the outside by giving them a new skin, or a new body even, what happens to their identity underneath? As we come to realise that Vera ressembles Ledgard's dead wife, Gal, we wonder, could this be her? Or is it someone who Dr Ledgard has refashioned to look like her? Almodovar has always been one to question identity, but this time round he has gone much further. Moreover, with the generous dose of humour usually found in his work distinctly lacking here, this is possibly the darkest film he has ever made.

The Skin I Live In feels much more a psychological thriller and marks a different direction for the director, yet his spirit still pervades. Almodovar has a talent for revealing humanity at its rawest and most preposterous in a way which, far from alienating the audience, usually tells us a great deal about ourselves, albeit it on a subconscious level. In this sense, it is still the same Almodovar at work here, but his investigations into the human condition have delved much deeper to produce a film that will get right under your skin.