There’s a long history of Hollywood pointing the camera back at itself – movies like Sunset Boulevard and Under the Silver Lake that expose all the alienating machinery that churns out fame, unrealistic beauty standards, and other potentially hazardous byproducts in the cultural capital of the United States. Skincare, the first fiction feature from music video director Austin Peters, builds on that tradition, following one aesthetician’s descent into paranoia after a business competitor moves in across the street from her glamorous Los Angeles office. Though the script, which Peters co-wrote with Sam Freilich and Deering Regan, lacks bite and balance, Elizabeth Banks gives a riveting lead performance with strong assistance from Top Gun: Maverick’s Lewis Pullman.
Banks has a knack for the heightened and the outrageous: She rose to prominence in films by Kevin Smith, Judd Apatow, and David Wain; donned the flamboyant hairpieces of The Hunger Games’ Effie Trinket; and segued into directing with a Pitch Perfect sequel and a horror-comedy about a bear on cocaine. But she stays relatively grounded as Hope Goldman, a longtime facialist-to-the-stars on the brink of her big break. Hope is a self-made woman who believes that charisma – and free samples from her upcoming product line – can get her anywhere. But with rent due and a stalker threatening her business and sanity, our poreless princess starts to go off the rails. Luckily, Banks is as adept at playing charming as she is at being unhinged.
Further bolstering her are a supporting cast of male buffoons, led by Pullman. Here, the Top Gun class of 2022’s lovable nerd plays Jordan, a smarmy “life coach” with a penchant for well-to-do older women. Among the other awful men in her orbit are Brett (Nathan Fillion), a philandering talk-show host, and Armen (Erik Palladino), her overprotective mechanic. As Hope’s reputation takes hit after hit and her prospects for launching a successful line of moisturizers, serums, face masks, and other patented remedies weakens, she begins to suspect that the competition, Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez), is the true villain in her story – never mind that he seems to be the only guy she knows who ever minds his own business.
That’s where the issues with this film’s plot start. It may be based on true events, but Skincare can’t figure out how to angle its own twisty narrative. Is Hope a master manipulator, or a victim who ends up girlbossing too close to the sun? Skincare leans toward the latter, yet it struggles to treat the truly heinous things Hope’s stalker does to her – including inviting random men from the internet to rape her at her workplace – with appropriate gravity. It would make sense to see her spare five minutes for a panic attack; instead, she pinballs from one incompetent dude to the next.
Hope’s dubious judgment is one weak point in a script that never masters tone. Skincare vacillates between humor, thrills, and pitch-black cynicism, and though Peters’ confident direction plays these notes with aplomb, his story never firmly lands anywhere. The opening (and the trailer) suggest a menacing tale of premeditated violence, but things veer into screwball territory as the plot develops. As a film centered around the beauty industry in which a woman is constantly let down by the men in her life, Skincare also promises fertile ground for criticism and self-awareness about show business, Hope’s line of work, and their various intersections, but it fails to fully deliver on any of those fronts.
Skincare’s packaging is really good, even if the product is less than miraculous. No doubt thanks to his background directing videos for Orville Peck, Haim, and Bastille, Peters turns in an effortlessly stylish film that’s a pleasure to behold. Before Hope’s life goes haywire, the camera revels in her uncanny work, playing up the menacing side of beauty with close-ups on gooey red mud masks and sci-fi-esque light therapy. All the epic needle drops don’t hurt this movie’s cool factor, either – drawing from artists including the masked queer-country icon Peck and pop diva Katy Perry, the soundtrack employs disarming bops to offset its characters’ nefarious deeds.
