Fantasia review: Cold Skin proves that human / amphibian love is here to stay

Sometimes great ideas strike in tandem, like that glorious summer in 1998 when we were blessed with both Armageddon and Deep Impact, two films about a giant asteroid threatening Earth’s existence. Now, fresh off Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water comes Cold Skin, another film with human / amphibian sexual congress at its core.

Set in the early days of WWI, the film stars David Oakes as an unnamed young man set to take over the role of weather observer on a small island on the edge of the Antarctic Circle. Once there he meets Gruner (Rome‘s Ray Stevenson), a haggard recluse who shows him that they are not alone on the island — they are in fact sharing the small space with a race of humanoid amphibian creatures. Gruner has actually grown quite cozy with one of the creatures, keeping her as a sort of pet / sex slave while he regularly thins out the ranks of her fellow creatures with a shotgun each night as they storm the lighthouse he lives in.

Opening with a quote from Nietzsche and regularly showing us a close up look at a copy of Dante’s Inferno in the lighthouse, it’s clear that director Xavier Gens (Hitman, The Divide) had some lofty expectations for Cold Skin, which does rise above the sort of generic genre thriller it might have become in other hands. The film works best as a simmering gothic drama, with a unique love triangle quietly unfolding in the close confines of the lighthouse. Unfortunately, much of that restrained mood is undone by the film’s over-the-top narration, which often detracts from the film’s unpredictable story beats and feels like a bad episode of a lower-tier cable drama.

A beautifully shot film with a strong and unsettling performance from Ray Stevenson as the unrepentant Gruner, Cold Skin is a brutal allegory about colonization and loneliness that never sacrifices its Lovecraftian chills. It may never reach the lofty heights that Gens was aiming for, but Cold Skin proves that human / amphibian love is definitely here to stay.