In My Skin

In My Skin is a New French Extremity gruesome body horror, inspired by an event in writer, director and lead actor Marina de Van’s childhood. A car ran over her leg, and she recalls “I felt no sense of panic, no pain, even though I should have passed out. I saw my leg just as another object”. De Van plays Esther, who becomes obsessed with mutilating her own body, and then escalates to self-cannibalism. With little narrative motivation, and very limited access to Esther’s interior world, In My Skin graphically and insistently focusses on Esther’s behaviour, her increasing detachment from her body and, paradoxically, her pleasure and relief in destroying it.