The Skin I Live In
Ever since his wife was burned in a car crash, Dr. Robert Ledgard, an eminent plastic surgeon, has been interested in creating a new skin with which he could have saved her. After twelve years, he manages to cultivate a skin that is a real shield against every assault. In addition to years of study and experimentation, Robert needed a further three things: no scruples, an accomplice and a human guinea pig. Scruples were never a problem. Marilia, the woman who looked after him from the day he was born, is his most faithful accomplice. And as for the human guinea pig…
3.6 out of 5 based on 18 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Certificate |
15 |
| Genre |
Drama |
| Director |
Pedro Almodóvar |
| Cast |
Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes Antoni Banderas |
| Studio |
Pathe Distrbibution UK |
| Release Date |
August 2011 |
| Running Time |
120 mins |
| |
Ever since his wife was burned in a car crash, Dr. Robert Ledgard, an eminent plastic surgeon, has been interested in creating a new skin with which he could have saved her. After twelve years, he manages to cultivate a skin that is a real shield against every assault. In addition to years of study and experimentation, Robert needed a further three things: no scruples, an accomplice and a human guinea pig. Scruples were never a problem. Marilia, the woman who looked after him from the day he was born, is his most faithful accomplice. And as for the human guinea pig…
Reviews
The Observer
Philip French
“... surprising and shocking ... As in all the films of his maturity from the mid-1990s onwards, Almodóvar, while often appearing camp and frivolous, memorably explores profound emotional and intellectual matters. He does in this cool, elegant and moving film, beautifully lit as usual by cinematographer José Luis Alcaine.”
28/08/2011
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Screen
Fionnuala Halligan
“The Skin I Live In sees the director working with his usual creative team...to distil their elegant and restrained art into an entertainingly preposterous story which is nudged even further along by Almodovar’s trademark gender preoccupations.”
19/05/2011
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Channel 4 Film
Catherine Bray
“The film looks as immaculate as the teasingly perfect creature played by Anaya and feels as coolly detached as Banderas' surgeon, the tragedy amusing rather than appalling.”
29/08/2011
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Empire Magazine
Kim Newman
“The year’s classiest horror movie.”
22/08/2011
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The Evening Standard
Derek Malcolm
“[There is] just enough genuine gore for a full-blown horror, matched with a dollop of psychology to mitigate the proceedings as art.”
26/08/2011
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“The film-maker presents an outrageous sequence of narrative and anatomical twists, yet cruelty holds hands with a kind of spellbound poetry.”
26/08/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“A luxury pulp fiction that breathes the atmosphere of the sick-room.”
25/08/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
“It's perhaps appropriate that a film about skin should ultimately feel superficial.”
28/08/2011
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
“The Skin I Live in is rooted in pain and loss, which pulls the film’s melodramatic side into a more thoughtful, provocative place than its surface suggests.”
24/08/2011
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The Times
Kate Muir
“As camp and ludicrous as it is, this is unmissable. ”
26/08/2011
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Total Film
Jamie Graham
“It’s all done with extraordinary finesse, and perhaps lacks the clinical horror that Cronenberg would bring or the soul-shaking dread of Lynch. But there is plenty of vigour in the visuals and the film pulsates with the anarchic brio of Almodóvar’s early, ‘enfant terrible’ movies.”
09/08/2011
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The New Statesman
Nina Caplan
“In this richly populated film, only one character is exactly what he appears to be, and that's a rapist in a tiger costume.”
18/08/2011
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Uncut Magazine
Jonathan Romney
“When Almodóvar finally lets us know what’s really happening, it’s with an outrageous twist – revealed by Banderas in a one-liner that will make your jaw drop with disbelief.”
29/08/2011
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“This is clinical, classy, cerebral horror.”
28/08/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
“[The Film is] constructed to induce kinky shudders, delivering them with the ghoulish technical flair of a purring master. [Almodóvar’s] pleased with his new game – perhaps a little too pleased. ”
25/08/2011
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Time Magazine
Richard Corliss
“There's no reason Banderas, after two Hollywood decades, couldn't do Robert justice; yet for a man whose mourning has turned to madness, he is strangely remote, lifeless, displaying neither rage nor poignancy. If Anaya is the heart at the center of the film, Banderas is the hole.”
19/05/2011
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Variety
Justin Chang
“Despite its scalpel-like precision pic falls short of its titular promise, never quite getting under the skin as it should.”
19/05/2011
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“Fashionable, and undeniably stylish, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has long exhibited a keenly prurient interest in transvestism, and he takes this a step further in this horror B-movie masquerading as art .. detached, smug, empty camp. ”
26/08/2011
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