Notesoncinema
Between Violence and Fantasy: The Brutal Allegory of Skin
Some films make you look away. Skin (2018), Guy Nattiv's Oscar-winning short, makes you keep watching even when you want to-need to-turn your head. It presents a world so charged, so extreme, so grotesquely cruel that it might feel fictional. And yet, deep down, you know it's real. That's what makes it so terrifying.
At just 20 minutes, Skin compresses an entire cycle of hate into a tightly wound parable. It begins with a disturbingly ordinary scene: a white, working-class family laughing in a grocery store parking lot. Their young son is playful, the father (Jonathan Tucker, in a quietly menacing performance) is loud but charismatic, and everything feels deceptively mundan...