The Skin I Live In
Pedro Almodóvar | Spain 2011 | 117 minutes | Certificate 15
Antonio Banderas stars as a wealthy and brilliant plastic surgeon who is secretly experimenting on the beautiful and submissive young Vera, whose entire skin covering he is replacing with an eerily smooth artificial substance, transgenically derived from pig hide.
Is the prisoner his long-lost beloved wife, widely thought to have died of burns in a recent car crash? Or someone else entirely, who he is surgically refashioning to resemble her?
★★★★★ “Pedro Almodóvar’s latest Hitchcockian thriller is a magnificent, deeply unsettling nightmare – its apparent inspiration James Stewart’s attempt in Vertigo to remake – to make over – a woman in the image of his lost love.” TELEGRAPH
★★★★ “Almodóvar again reveals his genius for turning the ridiculous into the sublime with this creepy skin flick – a melodramatic thriller that is sombre but never sober and that moves through time and space with much of the boldness and style we’ve come to expect from Spain’s leading director” TIME OUT
★★★★ “This is a truly macabre suspense thriller and a nightmare melodrama clotted and tangled with bizarre backstory. This is a film drenched in visual and self-consciously cinematic rapture.” GUARDIAN