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Amos Lassen wrote on 01/21/2012:

Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a plastic surgeon whose wife died in a burning car and now he is trying to create the perfect skin that can withstand anything. He is experimenting on one of his patients and when he has almost perfected the skin, the scientific community learn that his past is somewhat strange. His patient is linked to tragic events that we wants to forget about.
The plot is quite complex and deals with a topic that can make us feel discomfort. Banderas as the doctor keeps a beautiful young woman (Elena Anayas) and uses her as a guinea pig as he tries to create a new kind of skin. The genre that Almodovar enters here, horror, is somewhere he has not been before. Banderas plays Ledgard as a scientist who has lost ties to reality and is keeping a young woman as prisoner in his home and using her as a lab rat for a new kind of synthetic skin. As the story unfolds, each scene adds a little something.
Visually this is a beautiful film, something that has become an Aldomovar trademark because of his cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine. The film is deliberately ambiguous. Banderas is marvelous as the unsettling doctor—creepy and alluring at the same time and Anayas plays on the emotions.
There is no way that anything that happens here can be anticipated—we feel that there are some dark secrets but we have no idea what they are.
Ledgard feels that if his wife had the skin he was working on than he could have saved her. It takes him twelve years to perfect the skin. The film is quite shocking and deals with themes of obsession, revenge and playing God. Almodovar is always edgy and here he uses almost Frankenstein type horror and combines it with melodrama. We are taken into a world of emotion and there are several layers to the film.
The film challenges the viewer and it is not always easy to follow. I read somewhere that the film is what is known as a gearshift movie. This is to say that it starts off as one thing and then begins something completely different and this is what makes this film so difficult to review. It is hard not to give something away.