In My Skin

When businesswoman Esther (de Van) accidentally cuts her leg, she discovers that the wound is a source of pleasure as well as pain. Soon she is inflicting further blessures, neglecting her job and her relationship with her nice-guy boyfriend (Laurent Lucas), and sliding slowly into dementia…
At last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, de Van’s film provoked a steady stream of walkouts as ‘disturbing images and themes’ started to unfold. But, despite several grisly moments, it never delivers anything truly grotesque. Instead, de Van always seems about to show us something awful.
There’s no shortage of stuff to chew on, however, in this most graceful and poised of ‘skin-flicks’ – one which, like ‘Secretary’, shows scarification as a direct response to reification. The most remarkable scene sees Esther slowly threatening various parts of her body with a knife, making it perhaps the first stalk-and-slash film in which victim and assailant are the same person.