Skin I Live In, The
Entry updated 22 September 2025. Tagged: Film.
Spanish film (2011); original title La piel que habito. El Deseo, Blue Haze Entertainment, FilmNation Entertainment. Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on Thierry Jonquet's novel Mygale (1984; rev 1995; trans by Donald Nicholson-Smith as Tarantula 2002). Cast includes Roberto Álamo, Elena Anaya, Antonio Banderas, Jan Cornet and Marisa Paredes. 120 minutes. Colour.
Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Banderas) cultivates a burn-resistant artificial skin, but is banned from practice when it is disclosed he has been testing it and other transgenic practices (see genetic engineering) on humans. He and his housemaid Marilia (Paredes) and have been experimenting on a kidnapped woman, Vera (Anaya). One evening while Ledgard is absent, Marilia's son Zeca (Álamo) arrives, on the run from a robbery he has committed. He sees Vera on a security camera and assumes she is Ledgard's wife Gal, who had been presumed dead. He ties up Marilia and rapes Vera, but his killed by a returning Ledgard.
Marilia discloses to Vera that she is also secretly Ledgard's mother, and that he and Zeca were half-brothers. Zeca had fallen in love with Gal, but they were involved in a car crash as they ran away together, and Gal suffered disfiguring burn injuries. Ledgard brought her home and kept her in darkness to hide the extent of her injuries from her, but she killed herself when discovering the truth. He also believes their daughter Nora killed herself over the trauma of her mother's death, and the believe that her father had sexually abused her while she was passed out in a garden. Vera offers a different version of the events: at a party Norma was about to have Sex with a man named Vicente (Cornet) but suffers a traumatic episode when she hears the song that was playing when her mother died, and in trying to restrain her he accidentally knocks her unconscious. Believing that Vicente has raped Norma, Ledgard tracks him down, kidnaps him, and performs experiments on him to turn him into a woman (see Transgender SF), who is revealed to be Vera. Back at the house Ledgard attempts to have sex with Vera, but she breaks free and kills him and Marilia. After six years of captivity she returns to Vicente's mother and attempts to persuade her that the woman standing before her is her son.
While Almodóvar's earlier films were often florid, camp and deliberately excessive comedies and melodramas, by this stage in his career he was working in a more poised, classical manner. While in synopsis The Skin I Live In would seem to absurdly contrived and ripe for exaggeration, it is reminiscent of the way two of Almodóvar's acknowledged influences, Fritz Lang and Georges Franju, used a coolly restrained style to diffuse the excesses of labyrinthine plotting. It is his only (borderline) sf film.
Among other awards, it received a BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film, and Anaya won a Goya Award (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars or BAFTAs) as Best Actress. [CWa]
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