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All About My Mother director Pedro Almodovar returns with Spanish thriller The Skin I Live In based loosely on the Thierry Jonquet novel Tarantula. Starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes and Jan Cornet, the film tells the strange story of a surgeon who is holding a woman captive while he conducts experiments on a type of skin that cannot burn. The film is the first collaboration between Almodovar and Banderas for over twenty years.

Almodovar came across Jonquet’s novel ten years previously, becoming obsessed about what he calls the “magnitude of Doctor Ledgard’s vendetta.” This became the core of the film’s story which moved further and further away from the novel. Whilst writing the screenplay for the film which debuted at Cannes this year, Almodovar drew on the work of Geroges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face and the thriller’s of German expressionism-era director Fritz Lang.

Almodovar expressed an interest in pairing his former regular collaborator Antonio Banderas with Penelope Cruz but eventually settled for Elena Anaya. Production began last summer and the film premiered at the 64th Cannes film festival.

One critic described the film as a film which investigates Almodovar’s usual obsessions about “betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, sexual identity and death” while adding an element of science-fiction that verges on horror. He added: “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.”

The film will be released in the UK on the 26th of August and the USA on the 7th of October.

Trailer



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