La Piel Que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)

Almodóvar executes a change of tack away from his customary battleaxes, nuns, whores with hearts of gold and distillation of Sirkian melodrama as farce with Antonio Banderas as a plastic surgeon obsessed, after the tragic death of his wife, with creating a human skin impervious to harm, keeping a young woman locked up in his house as a guinea pig for his experiments.
The Skin I Live In is basically George Franju's 1960 Grand Guignol horror Eyes Without a Face put through the filter of Open Your Eyes, and while Almodóvar will never disappoint in terms of his mastery in unsettling the viewer on many levels, here he doesn't quite manage to crystallise an ambitious set of observations about the nature of identity. It's immaculately constructed, from image to casting, as you'd expect, but at a bit of a loss as to where to go after the familiar preoccupation with transsexuality has reared its head again.

6/10