Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2012
Starring Selma Blair, Joshua Close and James D’Arcy
Directed by Jeremy Power Regimbal
Home invasion is never an easy subject. The thought of someone entering your house and stealing stuff is bad enough but thinking it could happen when you’re home is truly frightening. Thoughts of being tied up, property stolen and the house being damaged are just the beginning as you never know the full intentions of the invaders.
After the accidental death of their young daughter, Mark (Josh Close) and Mary (Selma Blair), along with their young son, decide to drive to their family’s very large isolated vacation home in order to spend some quality family time together and help cope with their loss. Not long after their arrival they meet up with what appear to be overly friendly neighbours only to find out that Bobby (James D’Arcy), Jane (Rachl Miner) and their son Jared Sykorski are not entirely who they seem to be.
First time Director Jeremy Power Regimbal has managed to put together an amazing first feature. The audience at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival made their thoughts known during the screening of the film as they winced, cringed and gasped in unison during multiple moments in the film.
Getting this great cast together was possibly the best thing to happen to this film. Everyone involved does a fantastic job of conveying their various psychoses and neuroses. Without these marvelous performances In Their Skin could have come across as a campy low budget horror flick rather than the convincing thriller it is. As suspense movies go, In Their Skin does a very good job of controlling tension through pacing and the hard to master skill of foreshadowing.
Despite all that is good about In Their Skin, I still had a few problems with it. I didn’t quite connect with the attitude of Mark and Mary at the beginning of the film. I realize they are supposed to be affected by the death of their daughter but I wasn’t sure exactly what emotions they were feeling. Were they supposed to hate each other? Were they simply distant? It was never really clear. The end result is that the viewer is never truly able to connect with them as the victims. The other problem I had came from the way the film ended. The film spends so much time building tension and suspense but when it came to the conclusion, things seemed to end rather quickly and without much thought or creativity. While the ending wasn’t as dark as I would have enjoyed, I would have been just as happy with an ending that felt fresh and showed a little more development.
There is a lot of talent coming out of Canada lately when it comes to genre filmmakers and I’d put Jeremy Power Regimbal among them. He has a good grasp of pacing, camera angles and story concept and while he hasn’t created a masterpiece with In Their Skin, he has managed to put together a film that gets under your skin, even if only for a short period of time.
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