In My Skin (Dans ma peau)

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  February 3, 2009

  DrBenway

  On a purely visceral level, In My Skin is incredibly disturbing, if only for the graphic scenes of self-mutilation. Once you get past that, well, it's still a disturbing film, thanks to Marina de Van's intense performance and expert direction. As Esther, de Van creates a complex ...( read more)character; does Esther hate her body or does she love it? Is she feeling disconnected from herself, or is she in tune with her body?
  
  Being this is a foreign movie, it's impossible to imagine something like this coming out of Hollywood without seeming absurd. What American actress could pull off the role of Esther, who spends a large portion of screen time naked, eating her own flesh and drinking her own blood in self-cannibalistic communion, without provoking laughter? Angelina Jolie? Shit no. This kind of questioning cinema is beyond the abilities of not just Hollywood, but American independent cinema. Even the best of contemporary American indies, such as Requiem For A Dream, seem safe and banal compared to this.
  

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  June 9, 2008

  creepfreak

  A story about a woman tearing, eating, and slowly self mutilating herself. Literally.
  
  In My Skin is a bizarre, bloody grotesque, and disturbing little film. Not a movie for everyone, especially for those with a weak stomach, but for those who are looking for something complete...( read more)ly different, in a strangely deranged unique way, this is definitely the movie for you.
  
  In My Skin very much reminds me of some kind of David Cronenberg film. Strange, graphic and bloody, but yet very compelling at the same time. Gore aside, this movie also has some great performances, and the art direction is top notch. It's an artsy film where everything here moves at an extremely slow pace, but nevertheless, it all still seems so strangely beautiful. There's some strange message here hidden behind all the gruesome imagery, one that needs to be examined by viewers, where we can share our opinions and try to understand the actual point. Would someone, as the female character in this movie, really do the kind of things that she did? I really don't know. But out of all the crazy things that people do in this world, I wouldn't really find it hard to believe that someone, somewhere, would be doing something like this.
  
  Plot:
  
  "Attending a party, Esther decides to catch a breath of fresh air in the garden and accidentally cuts herself severely. Only later does she realize her injury and when telling this to her doctor, he asks her, "Does this leg belong to you?"
  
  While his question notes upon the irony of the situation, it actually is exactly what goes on in Esther's mind, as her body and mind are two. Hardly has her wound healed, before she cuts it open again, both in order to feel the pain, but also to watch how her flesh reacts. Slowly she becomes obsessed about her flesh, her blood and mutilating herself, going thru phases of self-vampirism and self-cannibalism, to a point, where she begins to peal her skin off, for later to take it out and feel it. Equally slowly, she becomes detached from the world around her, giving up friends and her job, retracting herself into a world, where she can be alone with her pealed skin.
  
  The self-mutilation of Esther begins as any other act of self-mutilation, due to stress and low self esteem. She isn't as attractive as her girlfriend, nor as successful at work. During the early stages of the film, while her girlfriend is writing a report for the ministry unsupervised, she has to rewrite her report, as her boss found it flawed. But soon it becomes obvious, that she has become addicted to it. During a business dinner, the image of her boss pealing a grape excites her to such a degree, that she first rips her stocking, then, as she watches her arm being detached from her body, has to go away for a moment, to satisfy her urge by cutting herself over and over. Its not lust, but addiction, and within days, her addiction has reached a level, where she hardly can get home, before she maniacally indulges in acts of self-vampirism."
  
  
  This movie also focuses a lot on slow driven character study. At first it gets us weirdly acquainted with the female lead, just enough as to where her pain later becomes more believable to us, and as the film goes on it only becomes even more shocking. I recommend this movie only for those of you who are really into extreme cinema.
  
  Other Reviews:
  
  "As unrelenting an exploration of isolation and dissociation as Roman Polanski's Repulsion."
  - The New York Times
  
  "A bizarre exercise in perversion that will well test even the most jaded art house audiences' appetite for the offbeat."
  - The Hollywood Reporter
  
  "Fiercely uncompromising psychodrama infused with a keen intelligence and a sinister primordiality."
  - Chicago Reader
  
  "In My Skin takes that pain/pleasure principle and magnifies it until you're either dumbstruck or running screaming from the theater."
  - Boston Globe
  
  "A truly trangressive film as unsettling as it is psychologically acute."
  - TV Guide
  
  "An experience you won't easily shake."
  - Entertainment Weekly
  
  "Spectacularly grotesque and literally nauseating, even for this usually intrepid moviegoer, In My Skin is among the more disturbing films in this blood-drenched cinematic season."
  - Los Angeles Times
  
  

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• 
  
  May 13, 2008

  habitualdamnation

  Completely FUBAR but deservin of academic study. Knew this woman was mad when I first saw her in Ozon's Regarde la Mer.

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  January 15, 2008

  EarthlyAlien

  The kind of film any Gore master would love. It explores serious issues of eroticism, control and women's relationships to their own bodies, and should be seen by anyone whose stomach is strong enough to withstand it. The lead actress, Marina de Van, gives one of the most powerfu...( read more)l performances I've ever seen.

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• 
  
  May 28, 2007

  kenstachnik

  so unsettling...oh god...it's...I feel so dirty

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• 
  
  March 3, 2010

  MARS9T8D4

  A brave and gruesome film chronicling the idea of the love-hate relationship between people and their bodies.

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• 
  
  January 2, 2010

  mirabella1996

  Sounds really interesting.I wonder if I'll be able to get hold of it?

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• 
  
  December 27, 2009

  TheQueensShilling

  

  
  

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  In My Skin

  
  In My Skin ( Dans ma peau) (2002)
  WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Marina de Van
  FEATURING: Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas, and Léa Drucker
  GENRE: HORROR
  TAGS: WEIRD, GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED
  
  PLOT: Esther is a nice yuppie girl who enjoys her office job. She also enjoys dismantling and consuming her own body.
  
  After disfiguring her leg in an accident, Esther develops a necrotic fascination with herself and begins to self-mutilate. She engages in auto-cannibalism while having hallucinations of limb disassociation. In My Skin is a different kind of horror movie. It plays on those grisly nightmares about things like inexplicably sudden tooth and hair loss, parasitism and other subconscious fears centering on uncontrollable bodily damage. There are no phantoms or monsters in De Van's film, no outside threat. The horror comes from within as a woman slowly sinks into insanity and demolishes her body.
  
  COMMENTS: In My Skin is a study of morbid preoccupation with the physical nature of the human condition. It explores dissatisfaction with body image, and the finding of a decadent delight in its destruction. The lead character seeks a deep psychological satiation through bodily deconstruction and self-consumption. She tries in vain to attack inexplicable and inexorable anxiety via the demolition of the human vessel.
  
  Esther (De Van) falls on some construction debris in back of a friend?s house and gashes her leg open. Oddly insensitive to the pain, she does not sense the severity of her ghastly injury. She discovers the extent of the damage later, but even then, she goes to a bar before seeking treatment. When she finally does obtain medical assistance, she perversely declines measures to prevent disfigurement. At this point, her psyche undergoes a sinister change.
  
  In My Skin is reminiscent of a Ray Bradbury story entitled "Skeleton" (one of two he wrote with the same title, and bundled together in a short book entitled, Skeletons, published by Subterranean Press in 1945). In the story, a man suddenly becomes preoccupied with and disturbed by his own bones. A quack doctor convinces him that his skeleton is indeed the source of the problem, and that his is not a unique condition. The man begins a gruesome journey into madness. Feeling invaded by his own skeleton, he finally cuts out his own bones. He feasts on the marrow and fashions one of his femurs into a flute.
  
  Like the Bradbury character, Esther becomes similarly self-destructive. The film never offers a clear explanation for the progression of her horrifying degeneration, but Esther derives a twisted, repulsive fulfillment from disassembling herself.
  
  Esther is at first ambivalent to her leg injury, but soon becomes obsessed with it. She fixates on the cuts on her legs. She is fascinated with their disfiguring nature and with the healing process which she compulsively strives to defeat. Esther stares at, caresses and picks at her wounds. Then she decides to deliberately exacerbate them. She slowly, sardonically slices her damaged leg repeatedly with a jagged shard of metal. She becomes engrossed by her disfigurement, repeatedly and violently abusing herself throughout the film. Interspersed with these gruesome episodes are scenes of her otherwise normal, daily professional and personal life. Her boyfriend and office companion become concerned for her, but are unaware of the full extent of her burgeoning psychosis and self mutilation.
  
  At a business dinner, Esther quietly breaks down at the table. First, she becomes absorbed with the meat on her plate. She impulsively and uncontrollably reaches into it and wads it up several times. It seems as if the arm and hand performing this action are beyond her control. She must grab them with her other hand to stop them. So far, the other diners don?t notice.
  
  Then, in a chilling scene, Esther hallucinates that her arm is completely detached from her body and lying on the restaurant table. It appears neatly severed, though no one else can see it. Esther gazes at it in horrified fascination. She is having some sort of psychotic delusional episode regarding her limbs, yet she is still more or less in touch with her surroundings. She suffers mental turmoil, becoming increasingly agitated and focused on her arm and her injured leg. She cruelly stabs her arm with a fork under the tablecloth. Her tension mounts and finally she can?t restrain herself anymore. She sneaks off to the establishment's wine cellar and begins to attack herself with a knife and fork.
  
  As Esther's downward spiral gains momentum, she isolates herself from the world in a hotel room. Then, she engages in an all out orgy of atrocious self mutilation. Not only has she developed an obvious fetish centered around her own living tissue, she seems to be compelled to separate it from herself and then eat it. Perhaps she is trying to rid herself of something else. Excising skin and muscle, then consuming it offers some sort of deliverance.
  
  Esther is the main subject of the film and she is the center of most of the shots. This centrism on Esther forces the viewer to inhabit her and to see her delusions from her self absorbed perspective. Esther takes delight in her twisted descent and seems unbothered by her incapacity for self control. Her actions are appalling and repulsive. One wants desperately for her to stop.
  
  Sheer horror is created when the viewer is forced to experience her acts from this first person perspective. Esther is driven to cut and, finally, cannibalize herself, biting into and devouring her own arm, sucking her own blood. She smears her blood all over herself and revels in it as if deriving sexual ecstasy. Then she starts in on her face. Her macabre obsession snowballs into further mutilation and playing with her detached flesh. She cuts off a lengthy swath of her skin and tans it to make a grisly souvenir.
  
  Watching a woman's profane satiation and release via her self destruction is an excruciatingly difficult endurance contest. The viewer may feel as if he is going to go mad, perhaps as mad as Esther. The scenes of Esther hacking, slicing, scraping, and eating her own flesh are depicted as non-sensationally as if the director was documenting a tourist on a Sunday stroll. The film's visual footprint is foreboding and darkly claustrophobic. It makes the viewer feel caught in a horrible stifling trap.
  
  In My Skin is a shocking spectacle, but not a blindly gratuitous one. Neither is it a profound art film. While it could have had more complexity and depth, In My Skin is not lacking in characterization or purpose. The film is an examination of morbidity. It is a superficial exploration of a unique psychotic rejection of the normal human condition and a resulting narcissistic obsession with gruesome body modification and perverse self-cannibalism. By avoiding a grandiose quest into the sources of Esther's anguish, de Van allows In My Skin to pass right to the terror element like scissors through paper. In its simplicity it creates substantial, distilled horror that is more than skin deep.
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  
  

  

  In My Skin - CLIP

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• 
  
  December 9, 2009

  TheAfterHours

  Definitely not for the squeamish. During Esther's "love" scenes with herself, I found myself looking away and even fast forwarding. It's ironic how I don't mind watching people get shot, but slow close ups of someone cutting their own skin or even biting it can really affect me....( read more) The director knew this and went for it! However, this being a European film the narrative was a lot slower than what we Americans are used to. And despite it being shot on 35 mm, it really looks as if it was shot on some video format.
  
  The story was good, but the way it was told is what hurt it. Ester's personal relationships seem to slow the down the narrative or just down right make it boring for me. I just felt it could have been more exciting. The ending was very ambiguous. I found out what it meant thru reading user reviews on IMDB. And that's not a good thing in my book. I understand what happened now, but they could have told that part of the story in a way that made more sense but kept some artistic integrity.
  
  I'm sorry, but I do not recommend this.

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• 
  
  November 29, 2009

  BurtHarbinson

  This disturbing little wonder is determined to cut and tear through your psyche and through the deep layers of flesh that you didn't think were even existent. A sexy and provocative display of blood, and glorified mutilation that journeys to depths I guarantee you've never imagin...( read more)ed.
  
  Marina de Van stars in her self written and directed, high anxiety, cringe-worthy blood orgy. A very impressive film in my eyes, as it was done with an extreme amount of class, with much detail placed into all of the little moments that culminate in a fantastic mind-fucking psychological thrill ride.
  
  There is something about the sight of blood gently dripping onto fabric, or slowly oozing out of your leg onto your face, indeed. Whether it is a pure narcissistic sensation of literally devouring yourself, or an extreme anxiety release, it is a completely perverse and dark erotic tale of the human ego.
  
  Marina de Van's acting performance as Esther is noteworthy. I was much further impressed with this film after learning of her involvement, and her commendable creation. This is of course, after I recovered from the initial shell-shock. This film is not for the weak stomached film-heads. Be advised.
  
  I will recommend this film to anyone who loves delving into the sick realms. Anyone who is impressed by a film's ability to freak them out should give this one a try. A mind-fuck that will not easily be forgotten.

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• 
  June 10, 2007

  Marc084

  The sickest show I have ever watched till date. I urge all gore fans to watch this. Marina de Van can take Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth or whoever else to a face off. haha..

• Marina de Van
• Laurent Lucas
• Léa Drucker
• Thibault de Montalembert
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