Newcomer director Austin Peters is the author of the story film “Skincare”, which focuses on the seedy underside of the beauty industry as it, acne scarred, searches for a new face in Elizabeth Banks. In just two weeks, an institution of the field of aesthetics loses her followers and her reputation within the social media world: the star aesthetician. The film produces counter-typical dark melodramatic thrillers of the American peddling nautical city, like Night Crawler or American Gigollo. They should have the capability to master sub-genre of the said films–Peters, the director, depicts their style with some confidence as well.
According to “Skincare”, sun-soaked Los Angeles is not the classic picture of perfect beauty that many of the film fans imagined, the one that any sane person would love to escape to. The light in “Skin Care,” on the other hand, is quite different; it is bright and harsh. Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks), an aesthetician with several notable clients, is literally in the spotlight as she prepares to launch her own skincare line in the market.
Despite portraying confidence during her product launch when she filmed a TV segment that would make her famous, Hope’s situation turns out to be one of chaos in terms of her finances. She has rental arrears for her spa and storefront in the extremely commercially popular Crossroads of the World polygon in American Hollywood, and when a rival beautician, Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez), appears on her territory, an already struggling Hope starts to disintegrate in a hurry.
Nevertheless, Hope’s disintegration is not entirely self-inflicted: Just as she is recuperating her public image, a shadowy figure known only as the stalker begins to attack her character, sending disturbed messages with videos of his face, intruding into her accounts and even deflating her car’s wheels. Desperate times call for desperate targeting of her most dependable companions, a bunch of sleazy guys which comprise a TV newscaster (Nathan Fillion), a mechanic (Erik Palladino) and an acquaintance of hers, Jordan (Lewis Pullman), a hyperactive millennial life coach.
The chore of “Skincare” became a two-hander with the hapless Hope and the equally hapless Jordan, who has I think some hero fantasies he hopes to project on her which don’t seem to be so convincing. I can’t say that I hate Keith Pullman who plays a narcissist, a delusional useless character who believes in his own poor motivational speeches while he sits between his cameras.-He is Frank T.J. Mackey from “Magnolia” but with the intellect of one of the thick retards from “Pain & Gain” directed by Michael Bay, in one of his underwhelming movies.
We now turn to Banks, who adds a brutally mean twist to the ambitious Hope. It is a fact that she is a victim in this case, but she is not entirely likable and how Banks walks on that thin line is masterful. There is sort of bitterness, because she is more concerned with how she is perceived and how she herself looks over everything else. “Skincare” would not be what it is if her opinions and assumptions did not Politely Play into a tsunami of miscommunication that leads to destruction.
Bank’s and Pullman’s tragicomic characterization makes them more than just an exercise in the genre which the film could have been turned–into an infinitely more interesting tale with a satirical edge. The script of Peters with Sam Freilich and Deering Regan is less interesting. Yes, the twists and coincidences fit but this is British beauty built around a lie, fantasy and superficiality, what other reasons was there for sitting it within the beauty sector? This is one question the film ‘Skincare’ does not seem to want to answer, at least not seriously.
Apart from making the audience cringe at how cheesy the movie is, there is no reason as to why 2013 was chosen as the year to set this film in. The use of Maroon 5 and Katy Perry songs in the movie adds to the time frame in an ironic sense of the word. However, such a film didn’t have to be set in a particular period.
Even though Peters’ screenplay has these self-imposed limitations (similar to Hope), there seems to be no doubt he is visually literate and together with cinematographer Christopher Ripley and editor Laura Zempel, he’s created some sort of horrible, stimulating, ‘80s inspired thriller–or at least its good enough imitation. The plot might be only thin layers deep, yet Banks and Pullman see some sort of empty hope in inhabiting such superficial pleasures.”
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