Skins (2017)

Skins is the rare film that uses surreal, fairy-tale grotesquerie not to shock you for sport, but to make you feel—deeply—how hunger for touch, dignity, and acceptance can warp or redeem a life. Eduardo Casanova shoots this strange world with bold, candy-colored confidence, yet the emotional core is bruised and human, finding unexpected tenderness in places most movies wouldn’t dare to look. It’s a darkly comic, dreamlike drama that treats its outsiders with real sympathy, asking you to sit with discomfort until it turns into recognition. This isn’t for everyone—some scenes are intentionally confronting—but if you can meet it on its terms, it becomes a heartfelt meditation on shame, desire, and the hard work of learning to live in your own skin.

Skins is trying to be a bold, candy-colored fable about loneliness and acceptance, using extreme body-horror imagery and interconnected vignettes to force you to confront how people fetishize, pity, and exploit difference. The problem is it often mistakes shock for insight, piling on grotesque visuals and taboo scenarios that can feel more like provocation than earned emotion, with some scenes of sexual violence and exploitation that are hard to sit through and not always handled with the care they demand. If you’re looking for a coherent story, subtle character work, or a feel-good message, this will likely feel punishing and self-satisfied. That said, it does have flashes of tenderness, striking production design, and committed performances, so if you can tolerate the extremity and want an unapologetically confrontational art-house experiment, you may find something in it.