SKIN DEEP: A Body Swap Romance Exploring The Modern “Self”

 Skin Deep opens as a disoriented man totters through a bedroom. There’s a catatonic figure lying in the bed nearby as light streams through the window. His befuddlement is ours as well. It sets a perturbing mood against the Gregorian undertones of the music.

There’s something strikingly beautiful in another subsequent image: a young woman suspended in the ocean deep as if it were some baptismal dreamscape though it may as easily be a liminal space suspended in the great beyond. Because moments later we are back to reality: The brisk sea air as a young woman sits cuddled up next to her husband.

They are Leyla (Mala Emde) and Tristan (Jonas Dassler). We join them as they head to an island for what looks like a weekend getaway. The haunting melancholy of the chorale arrangement persists as they travel across the sea; it becomes a kind of melancholy dirge. What it’s for is something we can’t quite express yet.

I admire that the film, by writer-director Alex Schaad, doesn’t feel pressed to explain itself. It keeps its secrets close and discloses them over time allowing us to recognize and discover most of them ourselves.

Mystery and wonder are sensations so often lacking in a world where we rush to Google to answer every unassailable question. Because if you’ve been on this rock for long enough, you realize a search engine can’t answer them — at least not the most crucial and imperative ones. We have to tackle those ourselves.

Playing with Genre

Ostensibly the scenario’s like an awkward speed dating ritual where two couples are thrown together for a preliminary dinner. Any introverts want to cry out loud at such a grisly fate. Our protagonists get paired with the loutish Mo (co-writer Dimitrij Schaad) and his wife Fabienne (Maryam Zaree). It’s grating and uncomfortable for them to be forced into a dialogue.

But in their most intimate moments alone Leyla and Tristan have a wonderful endearing level of connection as they joke about the people they’ve met and make the most of their circumstances because they are together. Though Leyla in particular is weighed down with despair. A specific name is not put to it, but that means we can all relate.

If you didn’t already have an intuition, the movie becomes a body swap story though not in the high-concept way of Freaky Friday. It’s like calling Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper a ghost story. This is certainly correct, and yet they eschew cursory genre labels. The premise is a mere jumping-off point for something more cerebral.

There’s a spiritual aspect as they approach and enter the white spiraling monolith in the middle of the island commune. The same carol of voices is present in the non-diegetic heavens above. We recognize they are in the midst of a bodily transformation.

Black interstitial cards denote what bodies Tristan and Leyla take on, and this is an ongoing rhythm throughout the film. He switches with Mo and she with Fabienne. It’s a straight swap that gives them strange sensations, and Leylith especially gets a new lease on life, like an anvil being lifted from her shoulders. Tristian is mostly disoriented and then perplexed when he meets Fabienne, now existing in his wife’s body. You might surmise what happens next.

The Rise of The Modern “Self”

Visually Skin Deep is such an inspired piece of invention for a budgeted sci-fi film. Instead of special effects, it relies on the actors and what they have to give us through posture and bits of business. What follows is an exploration of so many things from intimacy to gender and the modern self, whatever this means to you.

Watching the film, the person’s outward, physical body is only a swapped-out shell and when the name of a person is evoked, it’s in one sense tied with their spirit — who they remain on the inside, be it their soul, consciousness, or perhaps their cognitive self. After all, the modern self is perceived far less as physical and much more as our interior identity.

Still, it makes one question how we utilize names. I’m thinking in particular of an early sequence where Leyla gives a stammering introduction of her name, repeating it multiple times. Such a statement takes on a new tenor after she’s taken on different bodies.  Who is she really and what is her identity centered around?

It’s difficult to discern if the movie is capable of sustaining its conceit because now that we know the ground rules, it must go off in a new direction. The cinematography begins promoting this swirling out-of-body experience cutting between disparate glimpses of memory and the tangible present. In the immense freedom, you also see the continued fragmentation and dissolution of relationships.

One character notes our so-called “self” is a very fragile construct. You are the person you are because of the body you have. Leyla ultimately wants to shed her body and take on another, one she feels freer and less ridden with pain.

She swaps with one of their acquaintances, Roman (Thomas Wodianka), and it allows the film to explore its perceived sense of gender expression. Although by now it seems like a mere concept because we know Leyla is before us. Roman’s body is, again, only a shell…and still, Tristan must come to terms with this change, and try and accept it for the sake of his partner.

Perhaps it’s mere societal conditioning, but it’s hard to discount that something is still not right with Leyla and Tristan’s world and the relationship between them. They cannot maintain it going forward as is.

Whether you believe two people become one body when they are married or not, at the very least it becomes a complicating metaphor. They are physical beings, and it’s hard to switch out one body for another and not cause some kind of chain reaction — either within yourself or others. And even as the desire to pair off remains prevalent, there is still an undeniable tension between living for another person versus the pursuit of one’s own individual desires. It’s not always easy to reconcile the two without someone getting hurt.

Conclusion: Skin Deep

I was wondering if Leyla and Tristan would revert to a more conventional (or traditional) relationship which would be a cultural statement in itself. They nearly do, although they sidestep the status quo with a subtle twist playing with our conceptions one final time.

Skin Deep remains a thought-provoking exploration and an impressive first feature using all the resources at its disposal. Although it tapers off a bit by the end, there’s enough curiosity to make it intriguing viewing for the person craving a fresh, intellectual take on the conventional love story. What’s more, it conjures up some revealing questions about how modern humans conceive of their personal identities, especially in light of the people around them.