Review of our February feature

February 10-12

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The Skin I Live In

Reviewed by Joe Morgenstern
The Wall Street Journal

An urgent Alberto Iglesias score propels the action, but the theme song of "The Skin I Live In" could be a switch on a Cole Porter standard: You've Got Me Under Your Skin. Pedro Almodóvar's hypnotic new film is a switch on many themes explored in cinema classics, including some of the director's own. The first to announce itself is the Frankenstein myth. Robert (Antonio Banderas), a mad—and madly seductive—plastic surgeon, has invented an artificial skin. He's also holding a beautiful young woman captive in a sealed chamber at his country estate, and you shudder to think what he's doing to her.

This is clearly not Mr. Almodóvar in his exuberant-entertainer mode; the tale he tells is complex, austere, darkly witty and tinged with horror. Yet you're seduced by the gravely sumptuous images—the filmmaker's longtime collaborator José Luis Alcaine was the cinematographer—and captivated by the director's flawless control. Every time you think you know what the movie is up to, it takes an astonishing new turn.

Into what, exactly, is a question that can't be answered without revealing a succession of secrets that will not be revealed here. It's tempting, for instance, to discuss parallels to a Hitchcock classic, but telling you which one would break the spell that the film weaves in the course of making unexpectedly stirring observations on the persistence of personal identity, and the fierce will of the film's central person to survive.

Safe to say, however, that no one here is who or what they seem, although Robert comes closest to being a true representation of his tortured, terrible self—a man with no principles, scientific or otherwise, who drives a skin-white BMW coupe, mourns the wife he lost after a fiery car crash, and tells himself that he could have saved her with the skin he has only now perfected after some dubious genetic tinkering. The reliably superb Marisa Paredes is Robert's housekeeper and accomplice, Marilia, who has cared for him from the day he was born. Jan Cornet is Vicente, a young man on the make who comes to redefine the notion of a boy toy. Roberto Álamo is Zeca, a thief in a tiger's skin, complete with tail. Blanca Suárez is Robert's daughter, Norma, whom he chooses to believe was brutally raped.

And the beautiful creature in the sealed chamber? She's called Vera, and she's played exquisitely by Elena Anaya. The movie's first image is of Vera's body extended in a yoga pose, though what looks to be her flawless skin turns out to be a body stocking that—you get the idea, layers of skin in a film with layers of meaning. The twisted science responsible for her plight is chilling, in ways that flirt with but never fall for parody: a high-tech hospital in a sort of catacomb, gleaming scalpels, a cryogenic vat, a drop of blood vividly eroticized on a microscope slide. (Robert's hobby is bonsai trees, which are taken from nature and twisted into unnatural forms.)

Frankenstein isn't the only myth that the movie brings to mind—Pygmalion and Prometheus are in there too, along with more than a few pungent whiffs of vampirism. Still, Mr. Almodóvar is alluding to these cultural touchstones, rather than lifting from them, in what is ultimately an original film that forces us, time and again, to reconsider what we think we've just seen, and what we're sure we feel—not only about mere appearance, or fateful gender, but about who, under our skin, we truly are.
  --  Joe Morgenstern / The Wall Street Journal

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