Pedro Almodóvar is at his daring, provocative and allusive best with the scintillating The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito). A combination of dark thriller, gothic horror story and poetic myth, it visits most of the preoccupations of his work over the past 30-odd years from maternal devotion through sexual identity to obsessional activity.
It's based on a 120-page French novel, Mygale, by the late Thierry Jonquet (published in Britain as Tarantula), in which an eminent French plastic surgeon has a practice at a public hospital in Paris, a private clinic in Boulogne, a secret operating theatre in the basement of his suburban mansion, a beautiful, submissive partner called Eve whom he keeps under lock and key, and a teenage daughter in an asylum.
Jonquet's novella has been described by an American critic as resembling "an unholy collaboration between Sade and Sartre" and is clearly much influenced by Georges Franju's horror film Eyes Without a Face, a surreal classic in which Pierre Brasseur played Dr Génessier, a plastic surgeon obsessed with grafting the faces of abducted Parisian girls on to his daughter, disfigured in a car crash.
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