The Thousands

Both preposterously serious and blackly playful, Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama explores how trauma and perversion are literally inscribed on the body. Stylistically, it’s an enjoyable blend of Hitchcock and Argento, but above all Almodóvar evokes Georges Franju’s horror classic Eyes Without a Face, in which a mad doctor and his female assistant abduct young women to a country estate to graft new faces onto his hideously disfigured daughter.

Almodóvar suggests suave plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is driven by grief, guilt and desire when he invents a transgenic super-skin in memory of his wife, who died after being horribly burnt in a car crash. He recklessly tests it on Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he keeps locked in a room in his mansion outside Toledo, and who, as his loyal housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes) reminds him, looks suspiciously like Robert’s dead wife. But in an audacious twist, Almodóvar reveals another impulse gripping Robert – revenge!

Banderas plays Robert as intensely controlled rather than a gurning Frankenstein figure; only night sweats and eye twitches betray the depravity beneath his skin. Almodóvar has always gloried in the silkiness of flesh; his glossy cinematography and production design offer a luscious echo of Robert’s fascination.