Fantasia 2018: Cold Skin
Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 6:00PM by Jason Adams
The only child in me always dreams about and delights in films about people who've run away from the world of man to make a go of it by their lonesomes. They're duking it out with their own personal demons in the wilderness, of whatever sort, mano a mano. There's no greater fantasy of this sort than the Lighthouse Keeper. They wear thick-knit sweaters and write in their diaries and stare sadly into the distance at hella stormy seas - it's my fetish writ ten-fold. The old-timier the better - give me strange instruments and dials, knickers and elaborate mustaches, tweed piled to heaven, please and thank you.
Nobody tossed these fantasies into the abyss better than HP Lovecraft and Cold Skin, the new Lovecrafitan tale of terror from Frontier(s) and Hitman director Xavier Gens (it's actually based on a 2002 book by Albert Sanchez Pinol), is made of that same slippery stuff...
Right off the bat our wind-battered soul seeking solitude on a remote Antarctic island - he doesn't even get a name, he's only known as "Friend" (David Oakes) - has his space invaded; turns out there's another man on the island, the actual lighthouse keeper. See, Friend is just there to measure the weather - to, as he puts it, scribble down some notes about the direction of the wind. Meaningful stuff.
The lighthouse keeper is played by Ray Stevenson so you know he's gruff - just how gruff is a bit unsteadying though, and that's before the nightly invasion of fish-monsters from the sea begins.
If you watched The Terror this past winter you've got an idea of what to expect from Cold Skin - there's even one of those thousand-pound steel diving suits that are the stuff of steampunk nightmares - only Gens plays it less existential, to its detriment at times, leaning into a relentless, and purposefully dispiriting, sort of smash-em-up action. Still it's beautiful at times, and its heart beats with real sadness. Here is the dream of solitude, of Man Left To His Thoughts, soiled. Cold Skin is a fantastical fable about the lengths a desperate man will go to ruining the entire world around him just for some damn peace and quiet.
Reader Comments (1)
Hats off to Aura Garrido in this. She is one of the most promising Spanish actresses at the moment.