The same five or six stills from Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin I Live In are all over the web. Clearly a metaphor for certain social tendencies and surgical practices of our time, and most certainly not a horror film. Pedro doesn’t do “genre” — he does Pedro movies. Although it seems to contain echoes of George Franju‘s Eyes Without A Face and, to a lesser extent, William Wyler‘s The Collector.

“Richard Lafargue (Antonio Banderas) is an eminent plastic surgeon haunted by dirty secrets. He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve (Elena Anaya) imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror.”