Pieles

All of this just works. ― Todd Howard

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Pieles (English Translation: Skins) is a 2017 Spanish indie film created by Eduardo Casanova and is available on Netflix.

Synopsis

Deformed, disfigured characters must find a way to deal with society shunning their differences.

Bad Qualities

1. While the movie is supposed to promote acceptance to the disabled population, it goes about it horribly wrong. Most of the characters in the movie seldom have real world disabilities but are rather mutated.
   • Laura is a girl who was born without eyes and needs to use diamonds where her eyes would be.
   • Samantha is a young woman who has an anus for a mouth. (We wish we were kidding!) She also has pubic hair around her anus making it look like she has facial hair.
   • Ana, Guillie, and Ernesto are burn victims and are left with deformed skin to look like it’s melting and similar to the skin Wade Wilson from Deadpool.
   • While Christian looks normal, except for when he’s in a wheelchair and doesn’t have a birth defect or deformity like the other characters, he suffers from body integrity identity disorder. He wishes to be a mermaid but wants to have his legs surgically removed to do so.
   • Vanessa has dwarfism.
2. The movie overuses nudity and gross-out content for the sake of it and to disgust the viewer on purpose but contributes nothing to the story.
   • There’s a naked old woman in the movie for some reason, and there’s a large focus on her breasts for a good part of the beginning. Seeing the old woman’s nude body is terrifying.
3. The husband of the old woman is a pedophile and created those mutated humans, so he knew that society would shun them.
   • Speaking of which, the man also wanted to have sex with a prepubescent girl at the beginning of the film. What makes it worse is that there is no trigger warning for viewers traumatized from child sexual abuse, all the more making it seem okay.
4. The scene where it’s Samantha’s birthday is rather illogical and defeats the premise of the movie:
   • Samantha is often the source of butt and fart jokes in the movie. Her "blowing" on her candles is obviously made for comedic effect.
   • Why did she fart through her anus mouth when her real mouth is where her anus should be? Human flatulence is also flammable; in real life, this could’ve caught the entire house on fire.
5. Everyone except Christian, who died because he wanted Samantha to run over him so he can get his legs cut off is in his afterlife as a mermaid. While he got his wish, death is not a really happy ending.

Good Qualities

1. While the representation of disabilities is done wrong, it’s somewhat accurate because the main shunned from society, like Samantha was sexually assaulted, while she tried to commit suicide, she survived and got a boyfriend, the burn victims got reconstruction surgery, and Vanesa, who was pregnant, ended up having her baby.
2. The characters being an experiment is a very interesting concept, maybe their sole purpose was to teach the world how to accept disabilities.
3. Although muddled in the plot, the movie does reach its goal in pushing acceptance towards people with disabilities and differences.

Reception

Skins got 55% on Rotten Tomatoes and received numerous bad reviews on YouTube.

Trivia

• Samantha was Eduardo Casanova‘s first character and was featured in his short film “Eat My Shit”.

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