Skins
2022 · 14m · Canadá
Directed by Jaiden Reese
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
A young university couple who live together in a small terraced house experiment with a ritual that leads them both to surprising discoveries and to terrible consequences.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Skins does the obvious thing—couple + ritual = body horror descent—but never quite commits to the weirdness that would make it subversive; it's too content playing it straight for a premise that deserves to snap.
Reese demonstrates formal control in how the surreal unfolds through domestic space, and there's a lineage here—Ari Aster's claustrophobia, folk-horror's slow corruption—but the execution doesn't quite crystallize into the kind of considered argument about ritual and intimacy that would make it linger.
The film's real machinery lives in the performance choices between the couple—how Reese captures the micro-hesitations and shifts in how they look at each other as the ritual progresses—and it's that specificity in intimate acting that pulls the whole surreal apparatus into something genuinely unsettling.