Skin Deep

Schaad really ensures that we’re seeing beyond the surface. We’re experiencing the characters, their respective journeys, and their somber realizations that some incongruities can’t be fixed with a Band-Aid.

What does love really mean? Skin Deep gives an answer: that real love is an act of radical imagination, of working to understand what it feels like to be another person. In reality, we can’t just swap bodies to find out — but love beckons us to try anyhow.

Alex Schaad’s spiky, good-looking debut feature takes a clever concept and develops it into a witty, provocative exploration of identity, gender fluidity, sexuality and the pursuit of happiness.

Skin Deep is the type of quietly ambitious film that never forgets about the personal while immersing us in vast ideas about the underpinnings of identity itself. It is a poetic and profound gem of an experience you wouldn't dare swap for anything else.

Alex Schaad’s feature debut “Skin Deep” is a stripped-down sci-fi drama that takes its time to explore the social and romantic ramifications of its simple premise.

It’s not unusual for such high-concept films to indulge in a thorny and fascinating second act only to find itself grasping for a more defined conflict in the third, and that’s essentially what happens here, as the broad philosophical mysteries take Leyla down a rabbit-hole that might be too deep for her to ever climb out.

Though as fresh and conceptually far-reaching as a David Cronenberg film, it traffics in body ambivalence more than body horror, striking an eerie, wistful tone.