Utterly exhilarating and outrageously audacious, the new film by the Spanish maestro Almodovar is assembled with the precision of a Swiss watch and has almost as many moving parts.
Part post-Hitchcockian existential thriller, part mad-scientist horror movie, it's possibly his most straightforwardly entertaining film ever and a triumphant new collaboration with Antonio Banderas who starred in the director's first films in the 1980s.
Banderas plays a seriously nasty piece of work here, an esteemed plastic surgeon called Robert Ledgard who has, with no great regard for ethical niceties, concluded years of research by creating a synthetic skin that is better than the real thing.
We know from the beginning that this invention has something to do with a woman called Vera (Anaya), who is held in what may be isolation or captivity in Ledgard's luxurious gated mansion. We know also that the motivation for his Frankenstein search was the hideous disfigurement of his wife in a fire.
It takes us a long time to understand how these two things are related and why Vera has ended up where she has. Almodovar, who scatters tantalising clues everywhere, has a wonderful time letting us think that we have the measure of the story before turning it inside out to dazzling effect.
