In My Skin (2003)

Strange, oft-hypnotic look at the deteriorating psyche of a young woman who gains an obsession with bodily mutilation after a nasty fall. The film is by turns funny, hideous and disturbing, all the more so because star/director/writer Marina van de Ven works in a flat and unaffected style that accentuates the hyperfreakiness of it all. The film also offers no explanation as to its main character's inexplicable attraction to cutting herself to ribbons; however, enough room is left for the viewer to posit their own theories. (Myself? I see it as a thoroughly narcissistic action -- an affirmation of one's existence through the ravaging of the corporeal form. I bleed, therefore I am.) This is all well and good, but it'd be nice if the film was actually going somewhere too. But it doesn't, and the slow realization that it's not going anywhere make the last twenty minutes seem redundant. The open ending wasn't such a good idea either.

Grade: B-