What Has She Done to Deserve This?

The Skin I Live In

*** out of ****

Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar

Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes and Jan Cornet

Running time: 117 minutes

The Skin I Live In, the latest melodramatic thriller from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, features a simple story, but also one that is quite hard to stomach.

Although he has been making films since the early 1980s, this is only the second film from the writer/director to be based on a previously written work—which explains why the filmmaker, highly regarded for his complex storytelling, relies on stripped down, straightforward suspense here.

The story is deceptively simple, although the genius lies in how the exposition is revealed. The film freely jumps back and forth between 2006 and 2012, and focuses on Dr. Robert Ledgard (played by Antonio Banderas), a wealthy and renowned surgeon living in Toledo. (Antxón Gómez's production design for Ledgard's glass laboratory and his mansion's exquisite art-deco interiors is terrific.)

Ledgard is hailed by the scientific community for his breakthroughs with face transplants, but shunned when a new artificial skin, Gal, named after his late wife, is discovered to be moulded with animal genomes.

A precise and careful surgeon, Ledgard knows he would be criticized even further if any of his peers stepped inside his isolated mansion. There, he houses a captive, a lady named Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya), who is dressed in only a body stocking and wearing a head bandage.

At times, Vera treats her master coldly, particularly when she confronts the doctor about how he monitors her with a camera (he watches her with an unsettling, voyeuristic gaze that would get Hitchcock’s approval). At other times, she is eager to fall into his arms and submit to him with animalistic desire.

I could delve further into the bizarre relationship between the doctor and his patient, but since the story builds much of its intrigue from a surprising plot development that has been unwittingly spoiled in several publications, I will not.

But this I will have no regrets confessing: the truths that The Skin I Live In uncovers in its final act are creepy and deeply amoral. It exposes two monsters with intense psychological issues

Banderas and Anaya are fascinating to watch, both menacing yet controlled. However, after the central plot twist is revealed, Almodóvar should have pressed a bit harder: as fractured as Banderas is on the inside, the revelation questions some of his character’s motives.

Regardless, Almodóvar is a filmmaker who you can always rely on for three things: splashy colours, a seductive soundtrack and characters with major identity crises. He doesn’t disappoint with his signatures here, although the reds are bloody, the strings ring with suspense (another ode to Hitchcock) and characters work with clothing, masks and other disguises to reiterate the complacency and complexity of human identity.

Adapted from a chilling novel by French writer Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In has a twisted kinkiness that don’t stray very far from some of the writer/director’s more explicit features (see Matador, Bad Education). While it’s far from Almodóvar’s most complex film, his foray into psychological horror - think of it as the equivalent of a Human Centipede soap opera - is one of his boldest and most daring dissections of violence and sexuality yet.