Review of The Skin I Live In (2011) by Simon D — 28 Mar 2015

Murder, rape,secrets, lies, sex, illegal surgical procedures, incest, kidnapping, more rape, imprisonment, psychological torture, sexual assault, medical experimentation, revenge, mad scientists, , FORCED gender reassignment, lust, hate....

Any one of these subjects would be enough for an american psychological thriller film, but the spanish film "The Skin I Live In" has all of them.

Skin I live in.

The film star written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, and Roberto Álamois based on Thierry Jonquet's novel Mygale, first published in French and then in English under the title Tarantula.The film premiered in May 2011 in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, and won Best Film Not in the English Language at the 65th British Academy Film Awards.

Almodóvar has described the film as "a horror story without screams or frights".

The movie is about a surgeon who has also conducted illegal transgenetic experiments on humans, he is forbidden to continue with his research, meanwhile he is secretly keeping a young woman named Vera captive, a woman who has been forced into a bizarre unrequitted relationship with the doctor. Both of them carry dark personal secrets which is the main focus of the extremely unconventional narrative of the story within which all of the aforementioned subjects, and actions, their reasons and the motives are revealed in one of the best and ultimately oddest films of the last decade, foreign or not. To say anything more specific would sour the surprises. I highly recommend this underrated gem.