The Skin I Live In

Dr. Robert Ledgard is a brilliant plastic surgeon in Toledo, Spain, who has developed a revolutionary synthetic skin and is secretly testing it on a captive woman named Vera, held in a room in his estate under the watch of his housekeeper Marilia. Vera lives in controlled isolation — reading, painting, doing yoga — while Robert monitors her through cameras and treats her with a complex mix of obsession and clinical detachment.

The film moves backward to explain how they arrived here. Robert's wife Gal was disfigured in a car accident years ago and later took her own life after their daughter Norma saw her disfigured face. Robert raised Norma alone, but she was fragile. At a garden party, Norma was sexually assaulted by a young man named Vicente. She later died by suicide.

Consumed by grief and rage, Robert abducted Vicente. Over years, working in secret, he performed complete gender reassignment surgery on Vicente — not out of mercy, but to unmake and remake him entirely, modeled on the face and body of his dead wife Gal. Vera is Vicente, transformed against his will. The synthetic skin research was conducted on the body Robert himself created.

When Robert's violent half-brother Zeca arrives at the estate and attacks — mistaking Vera for someone else — Robert kills him. In the aftermath, Vera finds a gun. She shoots Robert dead and walks out of the house for the first time. She returns to her mother's clothing shop — the one she worked in before Vicente was taken. Her mother looks at the woman standing in the doorway and begins to recognize what she sees. The film ends on her face, quietly saying her son's name.