THE SKIN I LIVE IN

If you haven’t seen this film, stop reading right now!

It’s rare that I strongarm my readers right off the top of a review, but do understand that I have your best interest at heart. This film is fantastic – one of Almodovar’s best and one of the best of 2011. However, it is impossible to discuss the film, the story, or its effect wihout diving into details that re revealed in the film’s final act. So consider yourself advised, and consider yourself warned:

This film is one you should make a point to see, and I will be discussing it in gory detail below.

As THE SKIN I LIVE IN (LA PIEL QUE HABITO) begins, we meet Vera (Elena Anaya). As she moves about her spacious room with poise and confidence, we are left wondering a few things. Why is she dressed only in a body stocking? And why is she under surveillance?

We get what we believe are a few answers shortly thereafter from Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas). We listen in on the good doctor as he gives a lecture about advances he has made in bioresearch. Specifically, he claims to have developed a type of skin that cannot be burned or permeated by any type of insect bite. The medical community greets this news with a great deal of trepidation over its ethics, and we in the audience can already see the connection between what he’s reporting to have only tested on mice and the woman we’ve already met.

Vera is primarily watched over by Robert’s housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes). One afternoon, Marilia’s son comes calling seeking asylum as he flees from the law. As he speaks with his mother, he notices Vera on the closed circuit monitors and is instantly drawn to her. His instant lust for her is so uncontrollable that he binds and gags his mother and sexually assaults Vera. But before he can finish what he started, Robert interrupts him, and shoots him dead.

This attack prods Marilia to speak candidly with Vera. Turns out she has more than just a passing resemblance to Robert’s dead wife, and that her son was very much responsible for that woman’s death. We also learn that some years after Robert’s wife committed suicide, his daughter did as well.

All of this is news to Vera. But shocking as it might seem, it’s just the beginning. It’s not what Vera doesn’t know about her situation with Robert that’s disturbing…it’s what she does know, and what we eventually find out.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a character I’ve felt more conflicted about that Vera. When we first meet her, there’s a haunting sensuality about her. Watching her do her yoga routines and make her little crafts in that stark room…it draws you in and make you pity her solitude. Then, as we get shot after shot of that flawless face, and sorrowed eyes, we begin to fall for her. But as that final act begins, and we learn who she is all of that pity, romance, and lust starts to get muddied with truths of violence and sexual identity. It’s a lot of nuance to pile on to an ingenue, and Elena Anaya handles it with an astounding amount of grace.

Where THE SKIN I LIVE IN gets truly fascinating is on the second watch…where all of the seemingly innocent questions of intent discussed between Robert and Marilia. The first time around, the conversations about why Vera was made to look so much like Robert’s wife, and just what his intentions are play like a standard question of medical ethics. When one reflects on these conversations knowing what Robert has truly done, the talk becomes more twisted. The second time around, it’s pretty clear that Marilia knows that the situation with Vera is a deeply disturbing one. Interestingly though, we’re left to wonder just how much she truly knows.

The way that Almodovar is able to violently yank the rug out from under his audience is what makes this movie so truly unforgettable. Every marker in the opening act points us towards another story questioning the morality of science and medicine. We re given many indications that we are once again going to have the debate about whether doctors should be playing God…or when certain bioethics are broken, whether doctors are in fact playing Frankenstein. Turns out, Almodovar really isn’t interested in those questions at all. Instead, in true melodramatic fashion, Almodovar wants us to be very afraid of how a surgeon might settle a score.

Vera’s captivity and Vincente’s comeuppance would be enough to make this an elegantly haunting film. But not one to settle, Almodovar has infused his horror story with the sort of beauty and visual grace we have come to expect after films like VOLVER, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, and WOMAN ON THE VERGE. His camera moves about Robert’s spacious estate so fluidly, that it makes Vera’s inability to wander those same corridors and staircases that much sadder. Likewise, the theme of obsession is played up with the use of security monitors – whether they are zooming in and making the subject larger than life, or being licked in a perverted display of lust.

The film is unique for Almodovar in that he didn’t write the film himself. he has said that he saw it as a horror story without the screams or frights. He’s right, and the macabre nature of the tale is palpable from the isolation Vicente experiences down in that cellar, to the lines and lines of desperate words written on the bedroom walls by Vera. These are the sorts of tropes one expects to see in a Cronenberg film, not from the Spanish Master. Indeed, without a fright or a scream, Almodovar has given us a truly horrific film – a story that brings the “who?”, “what?”, and “why?” of a situation together into an unsettling trio sonata.

Matineescore: ★ ★ ★ ★ out of ★ ★ ★ ★

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