Beneath Your Skin: An Experimental Narration On Trauma Through The Lens Of Occult

It’s a topic that is seldom explored within the realm of psychological horror and/or thriller. Add to that a queer love story, innuendo-laden dialogues and laser sharp editing, and we get a 9:33-minute long film that blends the supernatural with the psychological. While plenty have tried to delve into it through the lens of history and mythology, writer-director Abbie Flaherty’s Beneath Your Skin flips the narrative as it explores occult and its practising members through the contemporary lens. Set against the backdrop of an ordinary pub date, two potential lovers meet, and everything seems charmed, until the sinister plans begin to unfold. Fast-paced, deeply atmospheric, the film relies heavily on its colour palette and production design to create the world of our lead pair.

When Alice (Beatrice Vincent) and Calista (Veronica Melkonian) meet–it’s electrifying. The attraction, the draw is almost palpable. Vincent and Melkonian bring an awkwardness, a tension that does well to their characters’ arc. The hesitation, the suspicion is interplayed all through the intentionally designed non-linear timeline. Add to that Flaherty’s editing, we get a disjointed, oftentimes disorienting timeline that works in the film’s favour. As the story sways back and forth, we sense the power dynamics switch between the lovers. Katherine Rowley’s cinematography adds an unmistakable tenor to the film’s narration. The wrench between the novice and her mentor, the dominant and the submissive, the perpetrator and the victim becomes a cornucopia of power that tightens with every change in scene, leaving the audience wondering about the cyclical nature of trauma and abuse.

Darius Barton’s music does a lot more to the film. Unlike the tropes of its genre, Beneath Your Skin doesn’t rely on jump scares, and so, it is to Barton and Sid Holder’s (production design) credit, that the audience experience the deeply unsettling world of Alice and Calista. The visual architecture along with the distinct hues of blue and red bring forth the stifling, unsettling world of occult practitioners, from where there is no escape, unless one becomes the martyr–but of what kind–that only the genius of Flaherty’s writing tells.

Beneath Your Skin is sensorial, layered and tightly wound leaving behind a trail of tense, visual depictions of dark art, heady worldplay and character arcs that enmesh itself within the rise and fall of human depravity.

Watch Beneath Your Skin Short Film Trailer