Bare Skin – Review
Bare Skin is an ambitious, quietly unsettling psychological thriller all talced up and squeezed into the latex cladding of a portmanteau.
It starts off with six strangers, each carrying deep trauma, attending a group therapy session led by Dr Hedonia. This is the central thread that holds together the anthology tales. These short segments are titled A Man Eclipsed, Desensitized, The Sound of the Woods, The Moon Bleeds, A Silence That Haunts, and Bare Skin.
Mico Montes’s script and pacing make the therapy environment feel claustrophobic almost by design as the narrative slowly reveals a deeper, more disturbing logic tying these characters together.
Where the film mostly succeeds is in atmosphere. There’s a few genuinely effective moments of tension, often created through close framing, moody lighting and a bit of smart editing.
Bare Skin isn’t without its flaws. Its anchor in dialogue-driven exposition means the film occasionally gets bogged down in scenes of implausible speech that pulls us out of the tension it’s worked to build. Not helped by the fact the sound is, unfortunately, atrocious. I was watching a pre-release screener of course, but I’m fairly sure this will have had the audio mix of the actual release. Dialogue is low and the score is loud, overpowering the cast voices and spoiling some scenes.
Performances across the ensemble are committed, but uneven, some actors bring a gravity to their trauma narratives, while others struggle to make the emotional shift from confession to terror fully convincing. This is possibly most apparent during the sound of the woods segment where, for me, one of the performances went a little gurning heavy.
The film’s slightly lengthy runtime – nudging two and a half hours -allows it to delve into each character’s backstory, but that also magnifies pacing issues. There are stretches where the energy flags, particularly when the film leans too heavily on monologue and you notice the sound mix and the word salad of a script. It’s a common problem in psychological horror: how much to tell versus how much to show and Bare Skin falls on the “tell” side a little more than it needs to. I feel if they’d had a little more faith in their solid production values and how good a job the film does of “showing” they could have shaved a bit of time off and ditched some of the more flowery exposition.
So despite these rough edges, there are moments where Bare Skin truly grips, and while every story thread doesn’t work perfectly, there’s a definite payoff in how they all fold into a chilling, if fairly conventional, final act that reframes what you’ve already seen.
In an era saturated with horror that screams and shocks, Bare Skin aims for something slower, more cumulative, and at times more psychologically corrosive. It won’t redefine the genre, and its moments of theatrical dialogue undercut its best instincts, but this is the kind of indie horror that does its best to dig under your skin.
On digital 23 February from Miracle Media
