Movie Review: The Skin I Live In

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the few filmmakers with the ability to infuse the screen with his own consciousness, and to see The Skin I Live In is to enter into his nightmare. Like a nightmare, the film has many recognizable strains and sources, and yet the arrangement of the material, the obsessions and the points of emphasis are entirely individual.

It is the nightmare of someone steeped in cinema. Vertigo, Eyes Without a Face, Rebecca, Frankenstein and every mad-doctor movie ever made, including Island of Lost Souls, are mixed into this movie’s DNA. They’re not referenced — references are too easy, orderly and too rational for what we see here. Rather, they are all part of the air.

Or to come at this from another angle, The Skin I Live In is like a David Cronenberg horror film as made by a director who doesn’t fear the body but revels in it, who is too sensual and amoral by nature to find anything truly disgusting or foreign. Almodóvar has spent a lot of time meditating on gender, on identity, on passion and on various forms of sexual expression, and all of that finds its way into this picture.

At its center is Antonio Banderas, showing much more command and presence than he ever does in his American movies, as a surgeon who specializes in facial restoration. Early in the film, with an unsettling combination of coldness and conviction, he announces that he has perfected a synthetic skin that will revolutionize the treatment of burn victims. But the skin is not really synthetic — it’s a chromosomological amalgam of human and pig skin, an entirely unethical creation.

Banderas’ good looks and our knowledge of him as Zorro might easily distract us at the beginning from realizing that he is a mad scientist. But the hints are there in the set decoration of the doctor’s mansion: Everywhere are large reproductions of famous paintings from all eras, all with one thing in common: They are nudes showing vast expanses of skin.

Another fat hint, a big fat hint, that the good doctor might be out of his mind is in the fact that he is holding a woman captive in his home. Vera (Elena Anaya) wears a flesh-colored body suit and lives in a locked room, either the beneficiary or the victim of the doctor’s skin experiments. One thing we do know, from the doctor’s spooky housekeeper (Marisa Paredes): He has given Vera the face of his dead wife. And we see that he observes her on a flat, closed-circuit TV screen that’s the size of a wall. The expression on his face is strangely fierce yet helpless.

As for the rest, today is not the day to reveal plot details that, as a matter of course, would have to be revealed in any serious discussion. But this much can be said: The movie’s arresting quality — the strange hold of it — derives from the tension between what Almodóvar thinks about the relationship of the doctor and Vera, and how he feels about it.

Intellectually, Almodóvar is horrified. But emotionally, he understands it. He is even seduced by it and, in turn, he seduces his audience. It’s that specific conflict that takes The Skin I Live In out of the realm of simple horror and gives it the complexity of greatness.

Or almost greatness. In adapting the novel that served as the film’s source (Thierry Jonquet’s Tarantula), Almodóvar had to jump back in time and then forward again, and that juggling act, however necessary, is the one graceless note in an otherwise graceful film.

Actually, The Skin I Live In is more than graceful. It’s eerily graceful. It’s practically unperturbed.