In My Skin

In My Skin is not a film for everyone (I'm not entirely sure it's for anyone). For starters, it's very French (in that "why are foreign films so foreign?" way), all fascinating concept and setup with no real resolution, but the movie is also off-putting in another sense. Blood, gore, body parts, and entrails are, of course, staple features of Hollywood fare, but what's different here is that the bodily damage is self-inflicted, intimate, and almost sexual: self-mutilation and even self-cannibalism as a path to self-discovery, as it were. Esther's (Marina de Van, who also wrote and directed) grotesque odyssey takes her from a slip-and-fall during which she cuts up her leg badly to an overwhelming obsession with her body as an object, one that can be cut and sliced and pondered, something that is intrinsically not her. In other words, this may be the ultimate horror movie, one proposing that, given the right stimulus, we could be our own worst nightmare. Highly recommended. (M. Johanson)