In 2014, Dawn DaLuise, a renowned Hollywood facialist, was arrested and charged with solicitation for murder after being accused of hiring a hitman to kill her rival, Gabriel Suarez. DaLuise believed Suarez was behind a campaign of harassment against her, which included hacking her emails, spreading fake lewd photos, and placing disturbing Craigslist ads. However, during the trial, it was revealed that a friend, not Suarez, had orchestrated the harassment. DaLuise spent 10 months in jail before being acquitted of all charges in January 2015, but the ordeal decimated her business and personal life, leading to a struggle to rebuild her career.
You’re forgiven if you haven’t heard DaLuise’s story before — even Elizabeth Banks, who plays the DaLuise stand-in Hope Goldman in the new film Skincare, didn’t know of the sordid saga when she took the role. Skincare tells a fictionalized version of these events; as Goldman prepares to launch her new expensive skincare line, a rival aesthetician moves in next door who claims to have discovered the secret to reverse aging. Mysterious events soon begin to plague Goldman, and the film’s premise subsequently sets the stage for what could be a gripping exploration of obsession and rivalry in the cutthroat beauty industry. In fact, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Austin Peters, who wrote the screenplay with Sam Freilich and Deering Regan, said he was inspired by “how image drives success and is often valued more than success itself.”
Unfortunately, that intriguing premise of a complex web of obsession, image, and rivalry seems to be the extend of what Peters had in mind. The missed opportunities in the script are glaring; instead of peeling back the layers of a potentially rich story, or opting for an arch ’90s-era melodramatic thriller style, Peters settles for a glossy, surface-level narrative that offers little more than a predictable ride from start to finish. Banks’ performance has its moments, capturing the unhinged desperation of someone losing their grip on reality, but even she can’t save a script that’s so out of touch with its own world. Her inability to understand how email hacking or Craigslist posts work are prime examples of the baffling level Skincare is operating on.
Peters called his film a “Sunshine noir,” which is surely an apt description of the final final he aspired toward. And aesthetically, he was mostly successful; clearly set in bright, palm tree-laden Hollywood, Peters visually juxtaposes this setting with corners of darker criminal intrigue. But in this, too, the failure is a lack of subtlety — what’s shiny and plastic on the outside isn’t beautiful on the inside. Truly some breathtaking insight, that. Instead of diving into the complexities of Skincare‘s characters and the psychological playground afforded by their psyches, or even the industry they inhabit, the film glides along predictably, offering little more than a superficial presentation into a world that could have been fascinatingly dark and twisted had Peters bothered to probe beyond the clichés of its surface sheen. And so, what should have been a sharp commentary on the beauty industry’s obsession with image or could have been a deliciously campy presentation of the same instead turns out to be as blandly vapid as the culture it tries to critique.
DIRECTOR: Austin Peters; CAST: Elizabeth Banks, Nathan Fillion, Lewis Pullman, Michaela Rodriguez; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: August 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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