Las Vegas Weekly

Film review: ‘The Skin I Live in’

Antonio Banderas has a plan involving Elena Anaya in Pedro Almodovar’s creepy ‘The Skin I Live in.’

The Details

The Skin I Live In

Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

Official Movie Site

IMDb: The Skin I Live In

Rotten Tomatoes: The Skin I Live In

Working with legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar for the first time since 1990’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Antonio Banderas plays a brilliant but insane surgeon who maintains an operating room on his private estate and performs regular procedures on a beautiful young woman (Elena Anaya). The doctor has created an unusually strong artificial skin, driven to the task after his wife died in a fire, and the young woman seems to be held captive in his house, with the complicity of his housekeeper (Marisa Paredes). And that’s really all I ought to tell you, because the only real charge The Skin I Live In offers is the gradual and increasingly demented reveal of what’s going on. Alas, there’s no emotional subtext to the outré scenario, arresting though it is; at the precise instant that the film threatens to address something real, it promptly ends.