Review of Skin

Based upon the altogether harrowing true story of Bryon Widner (Jamie bell) a volatile, self-hating white supremacist skinhead, and his truly gruelling emancipation from the bestial pseudo-Viking Vinlanders Social Club, a notoriously violent Neo-Nazi gang mercilessly headed by the cruelly manipulative matriarch Shareen (Vera Farmiga) and the no less poisonous patriarch Fred 'Hammer' Krager (Bill Camp). There is a spare, almost clinically ruthless quality to Nattiv's bravura film-making, and while constructing an uncomfortably bleak milieu, the witheringly honest, three-dimensional performances are incredibly vivid, grimly naturalistic, searing with life, and earnest writer/director Guy Nattiv rigorously maintains the dangerously febrile sense of imminent chaos with a breathtaking assurance! 'Skin' is an intensely passionate film with an almost unbearably fraught, emotionally draining climax that had every flexible fibre, every muscular aperture in my body demonstratively clenched until the welcome emotional decompression of the end titles! Not since 'Animal Kingdom' (2010), 'Once Were Warriors' (1994) and 'Romper Stomper' (1992) have I been so morbidly entranced by such a greatly disturbing human miasma of hopelessly skewed philosophy. 'Skin' bluntly exposes mankind's seemingly limitless capacity for ignorance, and the continued clear and present threat of a totalitarian, propaganda-soaked media, and how 'polite' society's glacial indifference to poverty can actively inculcate murderous hate among the dispossessed. 'Skin' proved to be an profoundly deep discourse of one man's especially hard-fought redemption.