Octopus Skin is about three teen siblings who while away their time on a private island somewhere off the coast of an unnamed city, swimming, fishing, sleeping together, or, in the case of Lia (Hazel Powell), playing with cotton dolls and presiding over a baroque dollhouse that matches their decaying home. Twins Iris and Ariel (Isadora Chávez and Juan Francisco Vinueza) are particularly intimate with each other and they all vie for the affection of Mother (Cristina Marchan), whose psychological illness isn’t given a name in this wilfully elliptical film, about a family with its own rules, boundaries, and emotional language. Father is absent, although that particular mystery only deepens when Iris transgresses the family’s most devout rule and adventures into the city, like a sullen but curious Kaspar Hauser with menstrual blood dripping down her leg.

These children do everything together, including activities generally reserved for furtive solo visits to the bathroom. Like the family’s impenetrable private world, the film’s self-containment relies on the total bond between Iris and Ariel, and its attitude lies somewhere between the mystic longing of Walkabout and a long, weird sub-genre of horror movies about eccentric families, usually charged with an implicit suggestion of incest. Aside from all its technical strengths—it’s a beautiful movie—Octopus Skin is special for going all-in with its take on adolescent fear. If contemporaneous movies like My Animal and Bitten both demand that characters muster the courage to embrace being a grown-up, Octopus Skin is perverse enough to wish for a flight back into the comforts of childhood, whatever that entails.

Stir, September 2023