Product Details

• Actors: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet, Marisa Paredes, Roberto Álamo
• Directors: Pedro Almodóvar
• Writers: Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Almodóvar, Thierry Jonquet
• Producers: Agustín Almodóvar, Bárbara Peiró Aso, Esther García
• Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: Spanish
• Subtitles: English
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: March 6, 2012
• Run Time: 117 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B006KSAPV0
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #284 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • #10 in Movies & TV > Blu-ray > Mystery & Thrillers
  • #31 in Movies & TV > Blu-ray > Drama
• For more information about "The Skin I Live in (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

For his maiden voyage into horror, Spanish maestro Pedro Almodóvar leaves the gore behind for a plunge into truly disturbing territory. If he suggests more than he shows, the human body still takes center stage, starting with Toledo plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (a chillingly understated Antonio Banderas), who did his best to restore his wife to her former glory after a fiery car crash, only to have his efforts be in vain. Since then, he's concentrated on a skin substitute that repels damage. Like Dr. Frankenstein, he's a single-minded obsessive, and even his housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), describes him as "crazy," but that doesn't dim her devotion to him any less. After tragedy reenters Ledgard's life, he finds the perfect subject on which to test out his superhuman skin. Almodóvar begins in the present before backtracking six years to explain how Vera (Elena Anaya) came to Ledgard's attention. Now, he keeps her locked in a room through which he observes her every move via surveillance cameras and one-way glass. At all times, she wears a surprisingly flattering body stocking in order to heal properly, and spends her days reading Alice Munro novels and making Louise Bourgeois-inspired sculptures until Marilia's hotheaded son drops by, at which point the household dynamics spin out of control. In adapting Thierry Jonquet's Tarantula, Almodóvar has embarked on his most perfectly controlled project. Like the lovely Vera, the film offers cool, attractive surfaces, but the secret behind the woman and the world she inhabits will chill you to the bone. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Product Description

Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a driven plastic surgeon haunted by personal tragedies. After many years of trial and error, he finally perfects a new skin – a shield which could have prevented the death of his wife in an accident years earlier. His latest “guinea pig” is a mysterious captive whose true identity masks a shocking mystery. The Skin I Live In is a masterful tale of secrets, obsession and revenge from Oscar-winning (Best Writing, Original Screenplay, Talk to Her, 2002) writer/director Pedro Almodovar.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A no-spoilers review of an absorbing and disturbing near-masterpiece, December 19, 2011

By 

Whitt Patrick Pond "Whitt" (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Skin I Live in (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Blu-ray)

The most important thing I can tell you about Pedro Almodóvar's film, The Skin I Live In (original Spanish title: La piel que habito) is that you should avoid as much as possible knowing anything about it beyond the most basic setup before seeing it. This is one of those cases where spoilers truly can rob you of the full experience of a film. I say this as someone who went into the movie knowing little about it beyond the fact that Pedro Almodóvar directed it and that it had to do with a plastic surgeon obsessed with a mysterious female patient. And that really is the best way to see it.

Adapted from Thierry Jonquet's novel Tarantula (original French title: Mygale) by Pedro Almodóvar and his brother Agustín Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In is a complex and, as the background layers are peeled away through revelation, deeply disturbing and chilling film.

It begins in the present day where we see Robert Legard (Antonio Banderas), a prominent plastic surgeon and medical researcher who, because of the tragic death of his wife in a fiery auto accident several years earlier, is obsessed with creating a new kind of skin superior to the skin we're born with, one that is not only both tougher and more resistant to burning and injury but also heals quicker and with little to no scarring. In his mansion, Dr. Legard has a special patient under his private, personal care, a young woman named Vera (Elena Anaya), on whom he is trying his new skin out. Our first impression is that Vera is a burn victim that Legrand is caring for, but it quickly becomes clear that Vera is more prisoner than patient. But just who is Vera? And how did she come into Legrand's rather questionable 'care'? And why does she so strongly resemble Legrand's dead wife?

As in so many his films, The Skin I Live In has many of Almodóvar's almost trademark themes running all through it: complex familial relationships; the intertwining of family and personal secrets; the nature of desire, brutality and obsession; the lengths to which individuals can and will go; how actions can have the most unexpected and sometimes devastating consequences, and how, ultimately, we can never escape our pasts.

The performances are pitch perfect, most particularly Antonio Banderas' controlled and controlling - and casually chilling - Legard, who has his mansion wired so that he can observe his 'patient' from almost any part of the house, and Elena Anaya's Vera with her perfect face and body and the haunted eyes that peer out from the skin she lives in, always aware that she is being observed. Added into the mix - and subtly working in other elements from classic standards of horror - are Marisa Paredes's Marilia, Legard's old housekeeper who serves as a kind of matronly Igor to Legard's Victor Frankenstein, fiercely loyal but openly disapproving; Roberto Álamo's Zeca, a brutal criminal on the run who serves as a kind of Hyde to Legard's Jekyll - lust, rage and animal cunning to Legard's cool controlled calculation. And last but not least, Jan Cornet's Vicente, a callow young fool whose impulsive self-indulgence triggers a chain of events with consequences more dire than he could imagine. All of whom are bound to each other in ways known and unknown.

The only reason I rate this four stars instead of five and call it a near-masterpiece instead of an all-out masterpiece is in how the final acts play out. After taking the viewer through a series of ever deeper and increasingly disturbing revelations, Almodóvar seems to settle for what I felt was a disappointingly conventional resolution. But that said, the film still stands out for all of the unexpected places it did take you before that slip back into the expected. There may be times when you'll think you've seen this movie before and you know what's going on, but I assure you, you haven't and you won't until the revelations have been made.

Highly recommended for any fan of Almodóvar's and for anyone else who likes well-crafted films that really push the boundaries.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Film of 2011, February 16, 2012

By 

M. K. Rhodes "Cvalda" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Skin I Live in (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Blu-ray)

**NOTE** Beware reviewers here who reveal major spoilers because they didn't like the film. Full appreciation of this film requires knowing next to nothing about it going in.

Don't let the awful trailer dissuade you: Almodovar delivers the best film of 2011, and more than makes up for the disappointing BROKEN EMBRACES. This is absolutely masterful filmmaking, with career best performances from Banderas and Elena Anaya, an incredible score, and the most shocking twist cinema has seen since the early 90s.

5.0 out of 5 stars Flabbergasting., February 23, 2012

By 

Harkanwar Anand (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Skin I Live in (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Blu-ray)

Every now and then a film comes and introduces to the audience an entirely new unheard of concept. The Skin I Live is a film with a unique plot, very well dramatized, high intensity story, some super acting and ended making me wish there were maybe three of four minutes more to it.

Of whatever little I have seen of Antonio Banderas, this is his best film.

The director Pedro Almodvar has made some outrageous films. Let's talk - "All about my mother" , "Volver" , "Broken Embraces" , "Talk to her" were made with such a heavy unforgiving sincerity. His work, I dare add is no less than a great book or a great painting which lasts for years - it is art. Of these films, All About My Mother was the most poignant one but imagine this - I think the director may just have raised the bar a little with "The Skin I Live In"

A real treat and easily among my top 5 films of 2011. The makers of the film deserve all the academy awards they can get but I won't be surprised if this is overlooked as it doesn't have a political message but there is a wondrous world this director manages to create within his films and for the love of that, this film deserves to be watched. The Skin I Live In stands alone, I have never seen anything like it. It will disturb you, rot your mind but in the end, own your vote of confidence.