The Fifteenth Night of Halloween: The Skin I Live In

ON THE FIFTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Skin I Live In (2011) by Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar. It stars Antonio Banderas as a mad surgeon who is driven to kidnap a man, imprison him in his palatial mansion, and transform him into a woman. Over several years, he shapes this unwilling test subject’s body through experimental operations, until it looks identical to his dead wife. The surgeon does this as an elaborate act of revenge on the man who raped his daughter and drove her to suicide. Along the way are many more complex plot twists—probably too many.

This film is based on the 1984 novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, which in turn I think must have been inspired by the 1960 French horror classic, Eyes Without a Face, one of my favorite movies (Almodóvar himself has admitted the debt). In Eyes Without a Face, a mad surgeon with a palatial mansion kidnaps a woman and removes her face so as to graft it onto his grievously disfigured daughter. The Skin I Live In borrows not just plot elements from Eyes Without a Face but its haunting white mask imagery as well (to much diminished effect, unfortunately).

The Skin I Live In’s major innovation to the mad surgeon tale is the injection of sex and gender dysphoria. It’s very stylishly made, with a bright and bold modernist color palette that contrasts with the dark subject matter. And Banderas and Elena Anaya in the lead roles are excellent. But there are so many convoluted plot developments that a good portion of the runtime is cluttered with awkward exposition and flashbacks, to the point that there is not enough room for the bizarre relationships to breathe. The daughter’s melancholy in Eyes Without a Face would not be so memorably disturbing if it weren’t made perfectly clear to us who she is early on. Here, we switch through three cases of mistaken identity before we can begin to grasp what these people are feeling, and by that point, they are as emotionally disoriented as we are. Additionally, Eyes Without a Face’s surgery scenes are still more viscerally shocking than most modern medical horror movies, including this one. These drawbacks make the sex and gender questions less interesting than they should have been. I think this film failed to have much of an impact on trans rights discourse over the past decade because its multiply backtracking plot doesn’t allow it to say much of anything for certain on the topic, progressive or regressive.

Despite all this, I did like it. Again, it’s quite excellently crafted, and it contains a number of stunning moments. I just think Almodóvar could have made something a lot more powerful by streamlining the script.