7. The Skin I Live In
Original Title: La Piel que Habito Pedro Almodovar is probably the most important and unique Spanish filmmaker that there has been. During the 90s and 00s, Almodovar made a string of standout classic films that saw international audiences really embrace Spanish cinema, winning two Oscars and a stack of other awards. Almodovar loves trashy film genres and it is clear that this includes a love of horror B-pictures from numerous references in the film-within-a-film segments of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Atame!) and Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos). Yet for all that the plot of the former, in particular, in which Antonio Banderas' psychiatric patient kidnaps a porn star to make her love him, has the makings of a dark and disturbing horror, in Almodovar's hands these stories are generally told with warmth and affection. It is the freaks and weirdos with whom the flamboyant director likes to identify. When he reunited with Banderas over 20 years after Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, though, it was for something genuinely dark, albeit shot through with the same off-beat sensibilities as the director's other films. A bizarre melodrama thriller of revenge, surgery and several very damaged individuals struggling at playing out anything that resembles healthy human relationships, The Skin I Live In defies description and categorisation. Almodovar directs with his usual visual flare and the film is stunning to look at, most of its best and most disturbing scenes play out in dialogue free visual sequences. Banderas, meanwhile, is no longer the callow naif of his earlier Almodovar collaborations. Indeed, he plays completely against the fun, charming type he has adopted in Hollywood as well, to give a career high performance as the dark, disturbed doctor.
See this if you liked: The Skin I Live In is truly one of a kind, but that's not to say that there aren't certain visual or thematic influences on Almodovar's work. The most obvious equivalent is the image of the masked woman from classic 1960s French horror Eyes Without a Face.