Cold Skin (2017)

Cold Skin (2017)

No, I’m not a fan of Xavier Gens! This French director has never made films that really interested me. I did, however, go for this one… but… what can I say?

As a reminder, Xavier Gens directed Hitman (2007), a film adaptation of the action video game directly inspired by the killer in Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Samurai (1967). He also had success with Frontière(s) (2007), but, for me, a French slasher film is going to look like High Tension (2003)… and that’s frankly not the kind I like.

Let’s move on to this film!
The late Ray Stevenson plays one of the lead roles. He was best known for his roles in TV series, but also for playing Frank Castle in Lexi Alexander’s action thriller Punisher: War Zone (2008). After that, he settled for secondary roles in blockbusters.

Here, he plays a kind of lonely misanthrope, sinking into madness.

David Oakes was in Truth or Dare (2012), not to be confused with 2018’s Truth Or Dare.

There are lots of actors and actresses who remind me of others. David reminds me of James Spader, for example! He had a Master’s degree in English literature while studying at Manchester University. Which explains why his narration is so good or why he was chosen for this role. But, without wishing to be unkind, it’s also an unnecessary narration. It’s very poetic, well written, but it doesn’t really serve this film.

In this film, he is the climatologist. But is there a female character anywhere? Yes, but in the form of a sexy aquatic creature! And who lent her features to this silent role? Aura Garrido! Yes, the Spanish actress.

Incidentally, the Spanish title is ‘La piel fría’. It’s a thriller with lots of action scenes. It’s not a horror film, as is mentioned almost everywhere. However, it is a film about monsters… and they’re pretty interesting, I must admit! The females are obviously reminiscent of Mystique, the super villain from the X-Men.

Cold Skin is a Franco-Spanish adaptation of the Catalan novel ‘La Peau froide (La pell freda)’ by Albert Sánchez Piñol (2002).

Great!
I didn’t like this film, but I’m still going to defend it for a start and make the best of it.

We follow the misadventures of a young English climatologist who is sent to a remote island in the Southern Ocean to study the climate for a year in 1914. While there, he encounters a tormented lighthouse keeper and some not-so-friendly creatures. It could have been really interesting, but it all falls apart! Both the script and the special effects. The stunts and make-up are particularly spectacular.

The atmosphere is spellbinding, the tension constant, and the script is made up of several stories, including those of the two “humans” who have come to lose themselves on this hostile island. But there are even more disturbing things: why is it that day suddenly falls and night arrives so quickly? It really does look like mistakes, because if these are ellipses, they’re really badly done.

There’s no doubt that they want us to ask a lot of questions about difference and its acceptance, the way we look at ‘the other’, love, hate, etc. I would have loved to have been able to say something like “All of this played out masterfully by David Oakes and Ray Stevenson, not forgetting the magnificent Aneris (Aura Garrido). A film off the beaten track. I really enjoyed it.” Unfortunately, I don’t have that enthusiasm!

Man is a wolf to man. Almost everyone knows it: we are responsible for our own self-destruction, in our actions driven by feelings we can’t escape. At one time or another in our lives, we have all been driven by a negative feeling that led us to make one or more mistakes with such a powerful impact that we often regret having done so, even years later. This film by Xavier Gens illustrates the point that if you do something irreparable, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

Xavier has his big fans, but he’s not alone! When it comes to French-language genre films, he’s one of the most exciting directors around, both in terms of his themes and the problems he’s had to deal with, notably on Frontière(s).

Here, he delivers a work in keeping with the violence of his filmography, but with a poetic verve that tries to captivate the viewer. A fan of the film wrote: “A number of names come to mind during the screening, whether from the seventh art, painting or literature, but “Cold Skin” never seems to be a melting pot as protean as it is unwatchable. Quite the opposite, in fact: the whole is stunningly beautiful, and a world away from recent production.” Waahhh! It’s lovely to see so much admiration!

Here’s the rest: ‘Thus, in its temporal and geographical setting, ’Cold Skin” confronts the violence inherent in human beings. Although far removed from the war taking place, the same confrontations are taking place on this island with astonishing brutality. It’s hard not to make the connection with the colonies, where “civilised” white men took the liberty of cleaning up after the original inhabitants, the better to treat them as savages to be educated. The ideological opposition that arises between Friend and Gruner (impeccable David Oakes and Ray Stevenson) feeds a whole background that is carried by powerful imagery magnified by Xavier Gens.”

Amazing! I love it when people speak with passion. I’m sad that I didn’t feel the same way. It wasn’t with any great pleasure that I watched this film. I didn’t feel any sense of wonder at Cold Skin! It certainly gave Xavier the chance to be discovered by a wider audience, as previously he had to be confined to genre festivals.

Another fan wrote: “Our warmest thanks go to Condor Entertainment for publishing this exciting title and allowing it to earn its stripes as an indispensable work of the recent European genre, which it should receive as soon as possible. In short, don’t delay in discovering this great film!

As you can see, I didn’t manage to defend this film. I had to go and find other people who gave their opinions to help me and complete the picture!

No, what I thought was that, right from the start, Cold Skin struggles to enthrall. Xavier Gens struggles to create a truly disturbing atmosphere. His film is too long for what it has to say and the plot is very thin and repeats itself over and over again.

At the crossroads of many inspirations (the Strange Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Shape of Water, World War Z, to name but a few), a film that was intended to be horrific initially arouses curiosity through its mystery and isolation, but quickly shows its limits, accumulating redundancies and many laborious aspects such as the insipid narration that prove tiresome… and make the time seem very long!

Soft, repetitive and relatively boring… there were undoubtedly much better things to do, like digging a little deeper into the characters, their motivations and the relationships between the creature(s) and the humans.

Here’s one of the shortest negative reviews I found: “Frankly bad, no script, everything is ridiculous. After just 15 minutes, you realise very quickly that we’re going in circles and that the best sleeping pill has no equivalent than this film itself.”

That’s it!
And if I had to talk about this film in just one sentence: a mystery revealed too quickly, a very poetic voice-over that doesn’t add much, so… apart from a not bad visual, there’s not much to get out of this insignificant film.