The Skin I Live In

The film is good: it's tense, it's intense, it's shocking, it's dramatic, it's engaging... but it's also brutal and quite illogical if we think about the details.

As far as I remember, this was the first Pedro Almodóvar film I saw, and it was up to my expectations. I heard that he was a very visual director, that he wasn't afraid to show ugly things as they are, with realism and authenticity, and that he sometimes brought us complicated, ambitious stories. This movie is all of those. Honestly, even though it's not a kind of cinema that I particularly like (and I don't think I'm the only one who sometimes feels uncomfortable when realism and rawness are taken to the limit), I liked what I saw. However, there are several flaws, mainly ...

After losing his wife in a fire, accomplished surgeon "Ledgard" (Antonio Banderas) has been working for many years on a type of skin that can resists burns! After about a dozen of them, he might be on the cusp of a breakthrough - but just how has he managed to develop this groundbreaking fabric? We, watching, are not the only people suspicious and as his fellow scientists become more openly sceptical, we begin to discover a little more of just what he's been doing for all of these years and that's the kind of plot twist that really does make you cross your legs! This is another of those stories from Almodóvar that is really quite disturbing - but not in any kind of hysterical fashion; it's an almost perfect paced and increasingly menacing s...