Certificate: 18

Running Time: 96 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

UK Release Date: 11 November 2024

WHO’S IN SKINCARE?

Elizabeth Banks, Lewis Pullman, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Nathan Fillion, Erik Palladino, John Billingsley, Jason Manuel Olazabal, Ella Balinska, Julie Chang, Medalion Rahimi, Wendie Malick

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Austin Peters (director, writer), Sam Freilich and Deering Regan (writers), Logan Lerman and Jonathan Schwartz (producers), Fatima Al Qadiri (composer), Christopher Ripley (cinematographer), Laura Zempel (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A celebrity beauty guru (Banks) suspects her rival (Méndez) of sabotaging her business…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON SKINCARE?

You’ve seen plenty of movies like Skincare before. Specifically, movies about ambitious people within certain niche industries attempting to succeed and live the American dream, only to fall as quickly as they rise once they start doing some shady, mostly illegal things. Off the top of my head, I can think of films like I, Tonya, Molly’s Game, The Bling Ring, and even last year’s Pain Hustlers which all more or less have the same level of satire and commentary as this one does, and it’s gotten to a point where it’s so easy to identify this kind of movie that it makes the resulting experience much less interesting.

At the very least, you can’t fault Skincare for putting in a bit more effort. Director and co-writer Austin Peters’ dark comedy is well-made, well-acted, and carries a light but noticeable style that harkens back to the sleazy thrillers you’d often get in the mid-80s. However, its thin script only ever goes as deep as the skin in truly exposing the ugliness of its target industry.

The film is about Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks), a well-regarded Los Angeles aesthetician who has launched her own skincare studio in the Hollywood hills and is preparing to launch her own line of beauty products. However, Hope’s perfectly orchestrated life begins to disintegrate when rival beautician Angel Vergara (Luis Gerardo Méndez) opens his own studio right across from hers, and shortly afterwards she suspects him of sabotaging her business and reputation, by sending out vulnerable mass emails in her name and creating fake online sex ads to attract even further unwanted attention. She soon turns to young life coach Jordan Weaver (Lewis Pullman) for help with taking down her competition in the world of beauty, only for things to get ugly – and violent – very fast.

Again, it’s not that hard to align Skincare with all those other films about ambition and greed as unsavoury bedfellows, and by comparison this one handles it all in a much safer manner. It follows all the expected beats and tropes with this kind of film, including one addition right at the very beginning that immediately spells a lack of confidence in the product: a flashforward to much later events before taking us back to “two weeks earlier”. From that point on, the film struggles to rebalance itself after shooting itself in the foot, because as is so often the case when any movie pulls this kind of thing (often to force a hook into the opening minutes as a way of intriguing the audience), much of the suspense is gone since you already know what direction it is partially going to go. All the while, you’re just waiting for the film to catch up to the very point it opened on, and there isn’t a whole lot else in the script – which Peters co-wrote with Sam Freilich and Deering Regan – to hold your attention during the meantime.

The writing really does take it down a peg or two, because you are always able to see exactly what this script is aiming to achieve, but you can tell that it needed a couple more rewrites to properly flesh out some underbaked details. Certain characters like a friendly mechanic are established as potentially important figures, only for them to come in and out whenever is most convenient for the plot. Other strands, including one that involves potentially incriminating audio of Nathan Fillion’s sleazy TV presenter, turn out to be so inconsequential that you wonder why they were even a part of the movie at all. There isn’t even much development in the central feud between the two main beauticians, which escalates so fast that important aspects such as general motivation end up being completely sidelined, so it all comes off as petty nonsense that happens to get way more extreme than it ever needed to be.

Peters does try, though, to give his movie a bit of an edge, even if it often feels relatively blunt. The filmmaking is perfectly fine, with some decent cinematography and a compelling (if, at least on my screener copy, overly loud in places) synth-heavy musical score by Fatima Al Qadiri. It’s also held together by a capable cast, including Elizabeth Banks who easily carries the whole film with a growingly unnerved performance, while Lewis Pullman has an attention-grabbing supporting turn as this odd Andrew Tate-esque character.

In all, Skincare isn’t a terrible film. It has all the qualities of a filmmaker with clear talent and the ability to execute a formidable style competently. However, thanks to a script that never goes deeper than the cream lathered all over people’s faces and bodies in this film, it will only ever be a movie that slots right into all the others like it, and nothing more.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Skincare is a well-made but ultimately unremarkable dark comedy that does little different to other films of this tone and satirical subject matter, despite some decent filmmaking and a capable cast.

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