Review of The Skin I Live In (2011) by Michelle W — 06 Sep 2012

Almodovar is clearly one of the great modern auteurs, a visual stylist with an eye for color and framing, and someone who can succeed equally well with melodrama, noir, or comedy (always verging on hysteria or the extreme).

Here, we find him in a darker mode, echoing Eyes Without a Face but pushing it further in a gender-bending direction than you thought it could go. Unfortunately, however, The Skin I Live In is something of a misfire for Pedro, keeping the audience at a chilly distance from the main characters and imposing a time-shifting plot structure that fails to satisfyingly resolve confusion generated early on.

Too many threads of the story become loose ends and as the whole thing unravels, we end up pretty far from where we began, seemingly in another picture. But Almodovar is so prolific that I'm sure we won't need to wait long for another chance for him to show us his real stuff.