Rol's first rule about promoting movies with plots that hinge on a huge, monkey frightening twist: don't. Don't mention the twist at all. Don't let reviewers mention the twist at all. Shoot every audience member as soon as they've watched the film so they don't tell anyone else about the twist. This is the only way your movie will ever be enjoyed as you intended it.
There's nothing worse than going into a movie knowing there's a twist coming. You spend half the film looking under your seat, round the back of the projector, under the lead actor's wig... anywhere the twist might be hidden. Chances are you'll stumble across it before the big reveal because twists only really shock if you don't know they're coming.
The frustrating thing about The Skin I Live In is that, although I knew there was a twist coming, and I was scouring the cinema to find it... I don't think I'd have rumbled it quite so soon if Pedro Almodovar hadn't helped me along. There's a clunking great clue in his choice of a specific narrative device about halfway through the movie that points a big fat finger at the twist and goes "hey, senors and senoritas, check THEESE out!" which kind of ruined the surprise for me. I don't think device in question was necessary and I think the movie would have worked much better without it... but other than that, The Skin I Live In is a stylish and engrossing piece of film-making.
Re-uniting with the director who made him famous, Antonio Banderas gives his strongest performance in years as a cool and Clooney-esque plastic surgeon with a dark secret locked up in his spare bedroom: Elena Anaya, an actress so impossibly beautiful you think she must have been poured from a mould herself. But did Banderas create this vision of loveliness out of spare parts lying round his plastic surgery clinic? How much does she resemble his long deceased wife? And why is he keeping her prisoner? To say anything else would spoil the surprise more than Almodovar himself seems willing to do, but I guarantee you'll have fun learning the answers.
Oh, and you know you're watching a Pedro Almodovar film when a man turns up in a tiger costume for no reason at all. Anywhere else, this might seem odd...
