The Skin [夺皮] (2020)

An online horror film (on iQiyi) which does not deliver on its ambitions.

The film opens with model Zhong Tonghui’s [An Ran] memories of her mother as a young child and the mother’s suicide.

Back in the present, Tomghui receives an invitation to her aunt’s funeral (in fact the aunt is a friend of her mother rather than a blood relation). When she arrives she finds that the funeral is not for two more days and the creepy servant Lao Zhao [Zhang Yanhe] insists she stay in the large family home.

Here she meets Li Baile [Nicolas Xiong] who has also come for the funeral. Strange things start to happen. Tonghui finds blood in her bath and hears noises in her aunt’s room. She and Li investigate but then he is accosted by two thugs who identify him as somebody else.

The plot makes little sense (to put it mildly) but the set up provides the opportunity to look at how Tonghui copes with her mother’s suicide. And with her apparent eating disorder.

But it chooses not to do so in any real way and, rather than relying on psychology, it leans too heavily on creepy music and the unexplained appearance of people and things to create an atmosphere of ‘horror’. The fact that the plot becomes increasingly daft does not help (being an online movie it manages to get away with a plot which has no non-paranormal explanation – other than ‘it was all a dream’).

A more-or-less deserved 4.5 on Douban, it might have worked better as a short film rather than a (albeit only 68 minute) feature. As it is, despite its apparent ambitions, The Skin (Bodysnatchers might be a more appropriate translation) ends up as just another run-of-the mill release.

It is disappointing from writer and director Qiu Yujie who was one of the writers on The Shadow Play and has gone on to be screenwriter on The Old Town Girls and to be involved in the development of the script for Love will Tear us Apart.