Film Review | The Skin I Live In

It's one thing for a film to scare you while you're watching it, but if you're creeped out by it hours after the credits have rolled, you know you're on to something special.

Prolific Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar's first stab (shut up) at the horror genre is a grisly piece of work, though it's so stylish that it almost distracts you from the plot's horrific implications.

It also marks Antonio Banderas's return to the Almodovar fold, 21 years after the Hispanic Hollywood superstar appeared in the director's bondage-tinged dark romantic comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

But his turn in The Skin I Live In is anything but comical. Banderas plays the surgeon Robert Ledgard, whose innovations in plastic surgery have elevated him as a genius in his field, but who hides a dark secret in his lavish Toledo estate.

A mysterious woman, Vera (Elena Anaya) - whom he keeps under lock and key in an isolated room, and whom he monitors at all times with cameras - appears to be made into a guinea pig for his experiments with artificial skin.

The bewildered victim seems to suffer from total amnesia, and only Robert's servant Marilia (Marisa Paredes) is privy to Ledgard's enigmatic past.

When Marilia's criminal son Zeca (Roberto Álamo) sneaks his way into the house and breaks into the Vera's enclosure, events spiral out of control, leading us to discover the serpentine twists behind Robert's mysterious arrangement... and his unquenchable thirst for revenge. The plot can't be summarised, not necessarily because it's a complicated affair - though it is, very much so - but because, far from giving us a big twist at the end, it appears to be constructed out of twists and turns to begin with so that spoilers would already be in evidence a paragraph in. This is partly down to Almodovar's rich array of sources for the film - Thierry Jonquet's novel Tarantula and the 60s French chiller Eyes Without a Face - and being a crafty director, Almodovar takes his time to unravel this tangled web of horrors: plunging us into a long flashback slap-bang in the middle of the action.

This is, in a way, the main thing that makes the film so memorable. There are no qualms about taking one's time to establish the strange byways of the plot gradually, so we get everything delivered clearly, with no trace of sloppiness or half-measures. This sense of artistic decorum is also reflected in the cinematography: Ledgard's abode - a luxuriant variation on the haunted palace image - is decorated with modernist artworks, and is delivered to us under a lush Spanish sun.

But the beauty of the surroundings and the soberness of its delivery - not to mention the natural charisma of the cast, not least the gorgeous, and frequently nude, Anaya - belies a story that could have been reduced to complete shock value in lesser hands.

The story spans rape, imprisonment, torture, forced gender reassignment, psychological anguish and, ultimately, murder. Like all of Almodovar's films, it's unashamedly built like a melodrama, and carries with it all of his usual preoccupations: blood ties and the ambiguity of gender chief among them.

The only difference is that here we have a far more grotesque story, which incorporates the depraved depths of the horror - and even science fiction - genres.

In putting together The Skin I Live In, Almodovar has set out to create "a horror story without screams or frights".

Thanks to his - somewhat uncharacteristically - restrained approach, he has succeeded. The underlying truths of the plot may be twisted (even sick) but they're delivered so clinically that you barely notice them until, making some deliberate effort, you compute them in your own head. This is the sign of an assured artist.

And in a cinematic landscape where we're hit over the head with cliché upon cliché, it's a welcome - if unsettling - challenge to the status quo.