The Skin I Live In/ La Piel Que Habito

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar Starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo 16 cert, limited release, 120 min

When Volveremerged in 2006, we all rubbed our chins and celebrated the arrival of a properly grown-up Pedro Almodóvar. The film had verve and colour, but it was a very different beast to earlier adventures in transgression such as High Heelsand Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!Set alongside the likes of Bad Educationand Talk to Her, the film suggested the old prankster was settling into a fecund period of thoughtful maturity.

Whisper it quietly. Hadn’t something also been lost? Didn’t you miss the naughty vigour of the earlier films?

Fear not. The Skin I Live Inis, in many ways, a deadly serious film. Concerning a plastic surgeon who applies artificial skin to an imprisoned woman, the picture – based on a cult novel by Thierry Jonquet — asks knotty questions about the extent to which outward appearance affects the inner being. Gender studies boffins will become hopelessly overexcited by the film's later sections. But, at its heart, the latest Almodóvar is a Grand Guignol shocker of the highest order.

The director’s old pal Antonio Banderas returns to play an archetypal – if more than usually attractive – mad scientist. Enthusiasts for the genre will expect him to lay out his mad plans to a more sober colleague and, after appalled rejection, retire to a castle with a helpful hunchback. This is pretty much what happens. The stone towers are replaced by the shiny walls of a clinical, hyper-modern house. A stern housekeeper stands in for Ygor. But most of the tropes of the deranged professor picture are securely in place.

Dr Ledgard’s captive is a thin, polished young woman named Vera (Elena Anaya). Contained in her icy cell, her face often hidden by a mask, she makes feeble attempts to kill herself and offers the odd puzzling sexual advance to her captor.

Events turn stranger still when a man dressed as a leopard (this is an Almodóvar film, remember) breaks into the house and makes threatening gestures.

This triggers a series of flashbacks telling the troubling story of the relationship between Ledgard’s daughter and a young man she met at a party some years earlier. A significant plot reversal is heading our way but, with admirable subtlety, the director allows the twist to emerge slowly rather than ostentatiously yanking back the narrative curtain.

There are unmistakable nods towards Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face,the greatest of French horror films, in the picture's queasy plot. Viewers, contemplating the doctor's God complex, may also find memories of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringersflitting through their mind.

The Skin I Live Inis, however, unmistakably a product of the Almodóvar psyche. Positioned somewhere between high camp and penny-dreadful melodrama, the film somehow manages to lucidly lay out its sociological insights without forgoing the director's taste for creative flamboyance. An orgy in a public place has the unsettling feel of a heavily drugged reverie. The leopard-man brings unexpected flavours of carnival to the bourgeois gothic.

Much of the credit for the film's success must go to the two excellent leads. Whether voicing Puss in Boots or firing guns in Desperado, Banderas has always demonstrated a willingness to set his own undeniable glamour in heavy inverted commas. His sleek mad doctor could sit comfortably beside any of James Mason's great manipulative maniacs. Meanwhile, Anaya makes something simultaneously fragile and sinister from the abused captive.

The end result is a classy slice of horror that – Volverfans will be pleased to hear – still plays like the work of a mature film-maker.

The master still has it. Long may he ply his singular trade.