After looking at a new movie from Big River last week, I suppose in the interest of balance it behooves me to check out a new offering from Get Clicks – or it would, if I could find one that actually caught my interest. No big releases from them, recently, movie-wise (as far as I can tell, anyway). The last one they made a big deal about that we haven't already done was directed by Michael Bay, and as you know, I have my limits.

Anyway, some nosing about has led me to – hurrah! – another obscure genre movie currently hosted by Get Clicks, which so far as I can tell didn't get any kind of cinema release in the UK, despite the fact this is a Franco-Spanish movie made in English solely to improve its international chances. The name of the movie is Cold Skin, made in 2017 by Xavier Gens, and based on a novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol (though owing a debt elsewhere as we shall soon see).

We are on a ship somewhere remote, in Autumn 1914, and a young man (David Oakes) is off to take up a posting as a sort of meteorological clerk on a remote island somewhere. Could it be that he is running away from the war consuming Europe? This certainly seems to be the implication. Already everything has got very Thoughtful and Significant. Soon enough the ship reaches its destination, but of the man our chap is replacing there is no sign. Despite the fact that the island is a thousand miles from nowhere, it still has a lighthouse on it (the script has a brave stab at explaining this rather obvious plot contrivance) and it turns out the lighthouse keeper, Gruner (Ray Stevenson), is a dissolute old grump unable to satisfactorily explain what happened to the previous weatherman.

Nevertheless, they still drop our chap off and sail away, leaving him with his anemometers and the notes left behind by his predecessor, which include some alarming anatomical sketches and the declaration 'DARWIN WAS WRONG!' which is never a good sign if you're a character in this sort of movie. Before very long at all, dark shapes are slobbering around outside the shack and webbed hands are creeping in under the door – the fish-men have landed, and they are not friendly!

Now, I have to say that at this point I was not unimpressed with the movie, but it did seem to me something had gone badly wrong with the pacing of it: we were less than twenty minutes into a film lasting an hour and three quarters, and we had already reached the monster-menace-jeopardy stage. How on Earth were they planning to sustain it for another ninety minutes?

But no: the film goes off in a slightly different direction. Our chap realises he won't survive alone and prevails upon Gruner to let him live in the much better-fortified lighthouse with him. The young, sensitive idealist and the bitter old misanthrope are thus thrown together in a nightly battle for survival with the swarms of (badly-nicknamed) 'toads' seemingly intent on tearing them to pieces. Things are complicated by the presence of a female fish-person whom they have, shall we say, a similar yet different interest in (let's just say that everyone gets lonely sooner or later).

Cold Skin would normally seem like a very weird film, but nowadays it at least has the advantage of not feeling quite as aggressively strange as The Lighthouse, a film with which it shares a number of superficial similarities: both films are largely two-handers, largely set in lighthouses, largely about the effects of isolation (literal and emotional), and so on. There's also the fact that both films are conducting respectful raids on H.P. Lovecraft – in Cold Skin's case, this is not just in terms of substance (angry fish-men on the prowl) but also some of the dialogue: 'What we know is a small island in the vast ocean of what we don't!' cries our hero. Compare and contrast with 'We live on a small island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity' (that's from the opening of Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, by the way).

Well, you know, I love a bit of Lovecraftiana, especially if it's engaging with the author's deeper themes and not just sticking a CGI version of Cthulhu in at the end as a sort of Easter egg. Unfortunately, Cold Skin is... actually, I'm not sure what it is. It certainly feels like an attempt at a more commercial movie than The Lighthouse – it has a lot more action in it, and it's not made in black and white using an ancient aspect ratio – and initially it seems like there may be some kind of metaphor going on for the first world war, with the endless, brutalising battle between the two men and the fish-creatures. But in the end it turned out to be less bleak and existentially dismal than I was hoping for, and the film turns out to be about the horribleness of people much more than the horribleness of a dispassionate mechanistic cosmos.

The film's highminded seriousness is impressive, and the performances from the two men are impressive – as is that of Aura Garrido as the fish-girl, I suppose, but I did spend a lot of time wondering where the prosthetics ended and the body-paint began – but in the end the movie still feels slow and heavy and rather portentous (I was looking at my watch long before the end). It's likewise an impressively polished production, but then I really think I need to stop commenting on things like that – these days it's an exceptional movie that looks primitive and rough around the edges.

I ended up not liking Cold Skin nearly as much as I wanted to. It's a decent film, made well, clearly with serious intentions – but it doesn't really grip, it doesn't seem to have anything unexpected to say for itself, and in the end its one of those films that seems happy to raid from Lovecraft on a superficial level but not really engage with his ideas in a deeper way. It passed the time reasonably and was occasionally not uninteresting, but I would struggle to give it a stronger recommendation than that.

Awix

22.06.20 Front Page

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