The Skin I Live In

A plastic surgeon named Robert Ledgard has spent years developing a synthetic skin tough enough to resist almost any injury, and he keeps a woman named Vera under close watch in the private clinic where he works. The housekeeper Marilia and a strange man in a tiger costume move through the same building, and Vera's past remains unexplained. Ledgard's experiments are bound up with the death of his wife in a car fire twelve years earlier, and his efforts have led him to cross into human genetic experimentation.

Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed the film, the fourteenth of the twenty-two features he has directed, following Broken Embraces and preceding I'm So Excited! Antonio Banderas plays Ledgard, with Elena Anaya as Vera, Marisa Paredes as Marilia, Jan Cornet as Vicente, Roberto Álamo as Zeca and Eduard Fernández as Fulgencio. Esther García and Agustín Almodóvar produced it through El Deseo.

The film was released in 2011 and runs 120 minutes. Made for about 13 million dollars, it took roughly 34 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.6 out of 10 from around 179,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.5 out of 10 from about 4,748 votes, while critics gave it 7.5 out of 10 from 178 reviews, so critical and audience responses sit close together.