Feeling more like a well-made TV movie of the week than an actual big-screen film, Skincare is the feature debut by director Austin Peters (a popular music video director, who helmed the great doc Give Me Future). The film is a fictionalized account of a true story about skincare specialist Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks), who is on the verge of launching her new line of personal products with the help of some of her high-profile clients and the beauty industry press. When we meet her, she’s being interviewed by a local morning talk show (Nathan Fillion plays the male host) for a piece that Hope believes will send her business to the next level. But when a rival skincare boutique, operated by Angel Vergara (Luis Gerardo Méndez), opens directly across from her store, things in Hope’s life begin to fall apart, and she begins to suspect that the two things are connected.
Hope’s email gets hacked and soon posts show up online that appear to be advertising for kinky, even dangerous sexual services, which shake her reputation and business to the core, and clients and publicity start disappearing while Angel’s shop is thriving. She recruits her life coach friend Jordan (Lewis Pullman) to unravel the mystery of who is sabotaging her business and disrupting her life while finding ways to repair her tarnished reputation along the way. She begins with having dinner with Fillion to get his show to air the interview they did, which was pulled in favor of a piece on Angel. The evening ends awkwardly between the two, to say the least. Speaking of men who are trying to romance Hope, her mechanic promises to take care of her problem with Angel if she considers dating him, and he crosses the line in avenging her, leading to a whole slew of trouble.
The biggest issue I have with Skincare is that its targets are proverbial fish in a barrel. I don’t need a movie released in 2024 to tell me that people in Beverly Hills are shallow and lie frequently about their status in their chosen profession. Hope spends most of her time lying to her landlord about when she’ll pay the rent, to her friends about how her business is on the verge of blowing up, and even though she has no proof, she convinces several people of Angel’s role in her downfall. Everyone around her lies too. Jordan’s life coach business is a joke, even if he does have solid ideas about how Hope can get her product line back on track.
Almost everyone in Skincare wants to be something they aren’t, but they’re trying to convince those around them they’ve already reached this elevated status. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and frankly a little boring. But more importantly, we’ve seen it a thousand times before, and it’s nothing new.
Banks is the perfect actor to play this part, because she’s likely seen this phenomenon from both sides at points in her life, and she plays it perfectly. Everyone else is solid in their roles, but too much of what happens here is familiar, including the characterizations. I’m fairly certain the movie isn’t meant to be a comedy, although parts of it are played for laughs, and there are plenty of idiots surrounding Hope making the laughs inevitable. But this isn’t a parody of an elite lifestyle; the lifestyle itself is a parody of the way people think rich folks act. Banks makes it work, and she’s the reason to see this movie, which is why I’m just barely recommending it. But maybe hold out until this thing is streaming in a couple of weeks.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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