Cold Skin (2017)

By CinemaSerf

David Oakes is one of those actors regularly seen in lengthy historical television adaptations, but rarely making any decent appearances on the bg screen. In this clever and stylish adaptation of Piñol's novel, he plays a young man (with no name, known only as "Friend") deposited on a remote island as a weather monitor. He is teamed up with the rather eccentric "Gruner" (Ray Stevenson) and soon their rather testy relationship is being regularly challenged by their need to defend their lighthouse home each night from an army of curiously aggressive marine mammals. The mystery deepens when we discover that "Gruner" has one of them as a part time lover that he treats pretty appallingly. As the daily carnage continues unabated, "Friend" tries to find out why these attacks happen and to try and find some sort of solution. It's quite an odd concept; the story lacks structure in any conventional sense. It isn't just that they don't know why the creatures are attacking, we don't either. Their bewilderment is our's too; and coupled with the remoteness and starkness of the surroundings it actually all builds eerily and quite compellingly to a rather decent conclusion. Jesús Olmo has adapted the novel sparingly and Xavier Gens allows much of the, at times brutal and violent, imagery do the work. Certainly worth watching.