The Skin I Live In


The Skin I Live In is a 2011 Spanish psychological thriller film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet and Roberto Álamo. It is based on Thierry Jonquet's 1984 novel Mygale, first published in French and then in English under the title Tarantula.
Almodóvar has described the film as "a horror story without screams or frights". The film was the first collaboration in 21 years between Almodóvar and Banderas since Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. It premiered in May 2011 in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, and won Best Film Not in the English Language at the 65th BAFTA Awards. It was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and 16 Goya Awards.

Plot

Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard successfully cultivates an artificial skin resistant to burns and insect bites. Calling it "Gal", he claims to be testing it on athymic mice. Presenting at a medical symposium, Ledgard privately discloses that he has conducted illegal transgenic experiments on humans. He is forbidden to continue with his research.
On his secluded estate, Ledgard holds captive a young woman named Vera with the help of his servant, Marilia. There he continues his illegal experiments.
While Ledgard is out, Marilia's estranged son, Zeca, arrives after having committed a robbery. He asks Marilia to hide him for a few days. Seeing Vera on Ledgard's security camera screens, Zeca mistakes her for Ledgard's deceased wife, Gal, and demands to see her in person. When Marilia refuses, Zeca binds and gags Marilia and then rapes Vera. Ledgard arrives and kills Zeca.
While Ledgard disposes of Zeca's corpse, Marilia reveals to Vera that both Zeca and Ledgard are half-brothers and her sons, unknown to them. Ledgard was adopted by Marilia's employers, though raised by Marilia, and later went to medical school and married a woman named Gal. Raised without privilege as Marilia’s son, Zeca eventually left to live in the streets and smuggle drugs. When Zeca returned years later, Gal fell in love with him. Zeca and Gal decided to run off together but were involved in a car crash in which Gal was badly burnt. Assuming Gal to be dead, Zeca left the scene of the accident. Ledgard took Gal home, keeping her in total darkness, without any mirror, to hide her burn scars. One day, while hearing her daughter Norma singing in the garden, Gal saw her own reflection in the window. Traumatized by the sight, Gal jumped to her death in front of Norma.
After disposing of Zeca’s corpse, in the present, Ledgard returns and spends the night with an acquiescent Vera. Ledgard dreams of the night of a wedding six years earlier, when he found his daughter Norma unconscious on the ground, having been raped. Mentally unstable after witnessing her mother's suicide, under effects of psychosis medication, a disoriented Norma saw Ledgard bending over her and mistakenly believed he raped her. Developing a fear of all men, Norma spent years in a mental health facility, eventually committing suicide as her mother had.
Simultaneously in the present, Vera, too, dreams of the same event. Vicente crashed the wedding and met Norma. In the garden, under the influence of drugs, Norma began to take off her clothes. Vicente kissed her, and they lay down on the ground engaging in sexual activity that confused and overwhelmed Norma. When ambient music changed to the song Norma was singing when she witnessed her mother's suicide, Norma started screaming. Vicente attempted to hush her screams, knocking her unconscious. Vicente fled the scene, unaware that Ledgard saw him leave on his motorbike.
Tracking down Vicente, Ledgard kidnapped him and held him captive, brutalizing him over a prolonged period. As punishment for raping his daughter, Ledgard made Vicente a human guinea pig for his experiments. Over a period of six years, Ledgard physically transformed Vicente into a replica of his late wife, using transgenesis and shaping Vicente’s physical appearance—moulding a vagina, breasts, hips, buttocks, and feminine voice—and renaming him Vera.
In the present, Ledgard's new relationship with Vera dismays Marilia, who does not trust Vera. Fulgencio, one of Ledgard's colleagues, reads a news story about the missing Vicente and recognizes him in Vera. He accuses Ledgard of falsifying Vicente's consent and of experimenting on him. Vera, who overhears their conversation, tells Fulgencio that she is here by her own free will, denies being Vicente, and says that she always was a woman. After Fulgencio leaves, Vera notices a photograph of himself as Vicente attached to the news story about missing persons. During the night, Ledgard and Vera start having sex, but Vera tells him that it is still painful after Zeca's rape. Ostensibly going downstairs to find lubricant, Vera retrieves Ledgard's gun and kills him. Marilia, alerted by the sound of the shot, barges into the bedroom with her own pistol in hand and finds her son Ledgard dead on the bed. Vera, who is hiding under the bed, shoots and kills Marilia. With her final breath, Marilia says "I knew it."
Freed from captivity and the need to play along with Ledgard's whims, Vicente returns to his mother's dress shop for the first time since being kidnapped. Tearfully, he tells his lesbian ex-colleague Cristina of his kidnapping, forced sex change, and the murders. As his mother enters the room, Vicente quietly reveals his identity to them: "I am Vicente.

Cast

Production

read Thierry Jonquet's Tarantula approximately ten years before the film premiered. He described what attracted him in the novel as "the magnitude of Doctor Ledgard's vendetta". This became the core of the adaptation, which over time moved further and further from the original plot of the novel. Almodóvar was inspired by Georges Franju's Eyes [Without a Face (film)|Eyes Without a Face] and the thriller films of Fritz Lang when he wrote the screenplay.
The director announced the project in 2002, when he envisioned Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz in the film's two leading roles, but eventually cast Banderas and Elena Anaya. The Skin I Live In was the first film Almodóvar and Banderas made together in 21 years, after having been regular collaborators in the 1980s. The film was produced through El Deseo for a budget of €10 million.
Principal photography began 23 August 2010 and ended almost four months later. Filming locations included Santiago de Compostela, Madrid, and a country house outside Toledo.

Music

Release

The film premiered on 19 May 2011 in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Due to developments in the industry of film distribution, El Deseo decided to abandon their previous release strategy for Almodóvar's works. The director's films had in the past usually been released in Spanish theatres in the spring and internationally during the last quarter of the year. The Skin I Live In was released worldwide in the autumn. The British release was 26 August 2011 through 20th Century Fox. In Spain it premiered on 2 September 2011. The film was released in the United States on 14 October the same year in a limited run through Sony Pictures Classics following its American premiere at the 49th New York Film Festival on 12 October 2011.

Reception

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 82% approval rating based on reviews from 179 critics, with an average rating of 7.5 out of 10. The site's summary reads "The Skin I Live In lacks Almodóvar's famously charged romance, replaced with a wonderfully bizarre and unpredictable detour into arthouse ick". Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
In May 2011, Kirk Honeycutt, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, said "Along with such usual Almodóvar obsessions as betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, sexual identity, and death, the Spanish director has added a science-fiction element that verges on horror. But like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as Almodóvar could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie." Honeycutt continued: "The film's design, costumes and music, especially Alberto Iglesias' music, present a lushly beautiful setting, which is nonetheless a prison and house of horror. Almodóvar pumps his movie full of deadly earnestness and heady emotions." David Gritten notes Almodóvar "reaches out tentatively into unexplored genre territory—horror...Yet despite squirm-worthy moments... the promise of horror gives way to Almodóvar's broader, familiar preoccupations: identity, blood ties, disguises and genetic traits." According to Gritten, "A list of the story's various elements— date rape, murder, secrets, lies, mystery parents, gender ambiguity, unbreakable emotional bonds—confirms The Skin I Live In as essentially a melodrama. Yet Almodóvar's story-telling is nowhere near as shrill as it once was: as a mature artist, he has refined his skills to a point where these soap-opera tropes assimilate smoothly into a complex whole....Typically for Almodóvar, it all looks ravishing, thanks to production designer Antxon Gómez and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine. All three men have the gift of investing mundane objects with a unique sheen; here even surgical instruments, about to be used malevolently, assume a dreamy, otherworldly quality. The Skin I Live In is the work of a master near the top of his game."
Upon its UK premiere, Peter Bradshaw gave it four of five stars, calling it "fantastically twisted" and "a truly macabre suspense thriller"—"Banderas is a wonderfully charismatic leading man; Almodóvar has found in him what Hitchcock found in Cary Grant. He is stylish, debonair, but with a chilling touch of determination and menace."
In an October 2011 New York Times Critics' Pick review, Manohla Dargis called the film "an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza"; according to Dargis:
It takes time to get a handle on the story, though it's instantly clear that something is jumping beneath the surface here, threatening to burst forth. Vera's plight and the temporal shifts help create an air of unease and barely controlled chaos, an unsettling vibe that becomes spooky when Ledgard puts on a white lab coat and begins doing strange things with blood....There are times in The Skin I Live In when it feels as if the whole thing will fly into pieces, as complication is piled onto complication, and new characters and intrigues are introduced amid horror, melodrama and slapstick.... Mr. Almodóvar's control remains virtuosic and the film hangs together completely, secured by Vera and Ledgard and a relationship that's a Pandora's box from which identity, gender, sex and desire spring.

Dana Stevens noted it was Almodóvar's "first attempt to blend elements of the horror genre with the high-camp, gender-bending melodrama that's become his stock in trade"; she called it "visually lush and thematically ambitious", a film that "unfolds with a clinical chill we're unaccustomed to feeling in this director's films. The Skin I Live In is a math problem, not a poem. Still, what an elegant proof it is." Stevens called it a "meditation on profound themes: memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival", a "multigenerational melodrama slowly fuse into a coherent whole", offering "aesthetic and intellectual gratification, but little in the way of emotional punch." The New Yorker ranked the film at No. 25 on their list of "The 26 best films of 2011".
In 2024, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino named it one of the best films of the 21st century.

Accolades

Anaya received the Goya Award for Best Actress. The film won Best Film Not in the English Language at the 65th British Academy Film Awards; in previous years Almodóvar won that same award for his 1999 film All About My Mother and his 2002 film Talk to Her.
Awards GroupCategoryRecipientResult
21st [Actors and Actresses Union Awards|Actors and Actresses Union Awards]Best Film Actress in a Leading RoleElena AnayaNomitated
Actors and Actresses Union AwardsBest Film Actor in a Leading RoleAntonio BanderasNomitated
Actors and Actresses Union AwardsBest Film Actress in a Minor RoleMarisa ParedesNomitated
Actors and Actresses Union AwardsBest Film Actress in a Minor RoleSusi SánchezNomitated
Actors and Actresses Union AwardsBest New ActorJan CornetWon
Argentinean Film Critics Association AwardsBest Foreign FilmNomitated
Australian Film Critics AssociationBest Overseas Film Nomitated
BAFTA AwardsBest Film Not in the English LanguageWon
British Independent Film AwardsBest Foreign FilmNomitated
Broadcast Film Critics Association AwardsBest Foreign FilmNomitated
Cannes Film FestivalPalme d'OrPedro AlmodóvarNomitated
Chicago Film Critics Association AwardsBest Foreign FilmNomitated
Cinema Writers Circle AwardsBest ActressElana AnayaNomitated
Cinema Writers Circle AwardsBest CinematographyNomitated
Cinema Writers Circle AwardsBest EditingNomitated
Cinema Writers Circle AwardsBest ScoreNomitated
Cinema Writers Circle AwardsBest ScreenplayNomitated
Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association AwardsBest Foreign FilmWon
European Film AwardsBest ComposerNomitated
European Film AwardsBest ProductionNomitated
Fangoria Chainsaw AwardsBest ActorAntonio BanderasWon
Fangoria Chainsaw AwardsBest Foreign Film3rd place
Fangoria Chainsaw AwardsBest Supporting ActressElena Anaya3rd place
Fangoria Chainsaw AwardsBest ScreenplayNomitated
Florida Film Critics Circle AwardsBest Foreign FilmWon
Fotogramas de PlataBest ActressElena AnayaWon
Fotogramas de PlataBest ActorAntonio BanderasNomitated
Golden GlobesBest Foreign FilmNomitated
Goya AwardsBest ActressElena AnayaWon
Goya AwardsBest Make-UpWon
Goya AwardsBest New ActorJan CornetWon
Goya AwardsBest ScoreWon
Goya AwardsBest ActorAntonio BanderasNomitated
Goya AwardsBest CinematographyNomitated
Goya AwardsBest Costume DesignNomitated
Goya AwardsBest DirectorNomitated
Goya AwardsBest EditingNomitated
Goya AwardsBest FilmNomitated
Goya AwardsBest New ActressBlanca SuárezNomitated
Goya AwardsBest ProductionNomitated
Goya AwardsBest Production SupervisionNomitated
Goya AwardsBest ScreenplayNomitated
Goya AwardsBest SoundNomitated
Goya AwardsBest EffectsNomitated
London Critics Circle Film AwardsLondon Film [Critics' Circle Award for Foreign Language Film of the Year|Foreign Language Film of the Year]Nomitated
London Critics Circle Film AwardsTechnical AchievementNomitated
Online Film Critics Society AwardsBest Foreign FilmNomitated
Phoenix Film Critics Society AwardsBest Foreign FilmWon
Sant Jordi AwardsBest FilmWon
Sant Jordi AwardsBest ActressElena Ayana2nd Place
Saturn AwardBest International FilmWon
Saturn AwardBest ActorAntonio BanderasNomitated
Saturn AwardBest Make-UpNomitated
Saturn AwardBest Supporting ActressElena AnayaNomitated
Southeastern Film Critics Association AwardsBest Foreign Film2nd Place
Spanish Actors UnionBest Male NewcomerJan CornetWon
Spanish Actors UnionBest Female PerformanceElena AyanaNomitated
Spanish Actors UnionBest Male PerformanceAntonio BanderasNomitated
Spanish Actors UnionBest Female in Minor PerformanceMarisa ParedesNomitated
Spanish Actors UnionBest Female in Minor PerformanceSusi SánchezNomitated
Washington DC Area Film Critics Association AwardsBest Foreign FilmWon
World Soundtrack Awards 2012Best Composer of the YearAlberto IglesiasWon
New York Film Critics Circle AwardsBest Foreign Language FilmNomitated