Skin: The Profundity of Transitioning, Distilled

The logline to Leo Behrens’s Skin describes it as a poetic self-exploration of identity. It does not mention the utter warmth and tenderness that the 7-minute wordless drama is capable of making its viewer feel, and the lion’s share of that credit goes to its sole actor, Lío Mehiel.

Opening on a scene of dereliction and lethargy, the film frames a person in bed in a room with the walls peeling. The lighting is apocalyptic. When they—smooth-faced, vaguely feminine, clearly miserable—sit up and see themself in the mirror, the exhaustion is palpable. There is no other furniture in the room. The walls are dying with them.

Mehiel plays a double role. They are the person dying on this side of the mirror; on the other side of it, they are a man waking up from what looks like cryogenic sleep. Not much is different: the man has stubble, and there is now a self-assuredness instead of the misery. The cool blue contrasts triumphantly with the brown-yellow—there is no doubt where the grass is greener.

When this future version of them reaches out to the character, it leads to a profound turn in the narrative. The man goes for their skin, peeling like the walls. Even as you think, Be gentle, he is already being gentle—not just with the skin but the the very thing it represents. There is tenderness here that is overwhelming as he pulls off skin to unearth an authentic mode of being underneath.

Skin is a resonant work that distils attaining selfhood into mere minutes of wordless connection. The performance is staggering, and so is the music: you feel the character’s relief. A stubble hardly spells fresh, yet you feel the joy of his newly minted life as a man, just a man. No pretenses.

Watch Skin Short Film Trailer