The Skin I Live In

House of horror

There's not much to say about Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In. Or rather, there's plenty to say, but it can't be said without exposing the movie's shocking secret. Almodóvar, the Spanish master of color and emotional tone, here ventures into the arena of horror, although his monster wears a suit and preys on only one victim. The story begins in hypnotic ambiguity, but then, halfway through, takes an unforeseen turn that suddenly thrusts us into stunned astonishment.

The monster is Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a wealthy plastic surgeon who maintains a fully appointed clinic in his luxurious mansion. Ledgard's life was unhinged some years earlier when his wife was disfigured in a fiery car crash, and subsequently died. Since then, he has been obsessed with developing an artificial human skin for use in epidermal restoration. Now, finally, by ethically dubious means, he has succeeded.

In a large, locked room in his home, Ledgard has confined a beautiful woman named Vera (Elena Anaya), who wears only a flesh-toned body stocking and spends her days in a regimen of yoga postures. Ledgard observes his captive endlessly via video transmissions to the many screens positioned around his home. His housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), brings her food that the doctor has enhanced with some sort of medication. Ledgard is as solicitous of Vera as a man so dead of soul can be, but their relationship is opaque. "You want to kill me," she says. "How long will this last?"

Having hooked us with this inscrutable setup, Almodóvar brings in the rest of his characters. There's Marilia's estranged, good-for-nothing son, Zeca (Roberto Álamo), who turns up at the house unexpectedly one day—wearing a carnival tiger costume complete with long, bouncing tail—and takes an immediate, unsavory interest in the woman in the skin-tight body suit whose image he sees on a kitchen monitor. We meet a boy named Vicente (Jan Cornet), who dreams of escaping his job at his mother's clothing store, and then Ledgard's teenage daughter, Norma (Blanca Suárez), who is destined for a fateful encounter that will launch the plot into its harrowing crescendo.

There's little choice but to leave it at that. The movie is shot (by longtime Almodóvar collaborator José Luis Alcaine) with the director's customary elegance and rigorous control of color—coolly muted, for the most part, but daubed with ranging shades of red, from crimson to dusty rose. The story is deeply concerned with issues of gender and identity—with Ledgard's murky intentions, sealed away behind his icy exterior, and with the weary torment endured by Vera, imprisoned in the second skin of her leotard. (Anaya also displays quite a lot of real skin—gently swelling with breath, aglow in a cocoon of dark bed sheets. She has, as Almodóvar noted after a recent New York screening, "a perfect body," and it's happily matched with a smooth command of her strange, haunted character.)    

The Skin I Live In is unique among Almodóvar's many celebrated films, and uniquely unsettling. In lesser hands, its story might have collapsed into lurid sensation. But the director has achieved something more frightening: As outlandish as his tale may be, its central horror feels disturbingly real.

Kurt Loder is a writer living in New York. His third book, a collection of film reviews called The Good, the Bad and the Godawful, will be out on November 8th from St. Martin's Press. Follow him on Twitter at kurt_loder.