SKINCARE (2024)
Aesthetician Hope Goldman's new skincare line is threatened when a rival opens shop across the street. Suspecting sabotage, she investigates who's trying to ruin her business.

Aesthetician Hope Goldman's new skincare line is threatened when a rival opens shop across the street. Suspecting sabotage, she investigates who's trying to ruin her business.
Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is an acclaimed facialist with a high-profile client list who’s recently started her own skincare line. Set in 2013, when ‘Girlbossing’ was at its height, Hope’s life looks perfect. Giving facials to stars from her glossy Hollywood-based salon, Hope is seemingly at the top of her career, yet this success is only on the surface. Her rise to success is smartly summarised during a TV interview early in the film…
The opening shot is a close-up of the cracks in Hope’s heavy foundation, an on-the-nose metaphor for her life. She owes her landlord (John Billingsley) rent on her Hollywood studio, and all her assets are tied up in a failing skincare business after her silent partner abandoned her mid-process. Things get even worse when Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez) opens up a rival business opposite. Hope soon learns that in the shallow world of Los Angeles aesthetics, loyalty means nothing when the next hottest thing has arrived on the scene.
Soon, Hope becomes a victim of a horrible series of harassment. Her tyres are slashed, her e-mails hacked, and salacious ads are placed online under her name. She suspects Angel is responsible for the deliberate sabotage of her professional and personal life. To battle the harassment, Hope enlists the help of confident life coach Jordan (Lewis Pullman) and, separately, her friend Arment (Erik Palladino). It sounds much more exciting than the finished product.
Skincare doesn’t give Elizabeth Banks enough material to sink her teeth into. As an actress more than capable of handling the drama and the comedy, the writing doesn’t run deep enough to let Banks go wild. This stranger than fiction tale had the potential to be razor sharp and explore the toxic lengths people will go to for success and the ugly side of beauty.
Hope is based on Dawn DaLuise, a woman more flawed and complicated than this movie gives her credit for. In Skincare, the screenplay can’t decide whether Hope is a manipulative woman thirsty for fame and in control of her life or a helpless damsel in distress bumbling through life. Her character is inconsistent, and audiences will likely walk away wondering who Hope is.
Aside from Hope, the cast of Skincare feels like one-dimensional cliches with no real depth. Hope’s assistant Marine (Pose star Michaela Jaé Rodriguez) has no internal arc and solely exists as someone for the writers to bounce the narrative off. Lewis Pullman (Salem’s Lot) is hugely wasted as the cringe-worthy, overly-tanned guru, and Nathan Fillion has a very minimal role as a sleazy TV news anchor. Luis Gerardo Méndez commits to his role as the cocky hotspot, Angel, yet some of the character choices feel unauthentic in the hopes of landing a joke. Everyone in Skincare exists as a Hollywood cardboard cutout, not deep enough to feel real yet never pushed far enough to be satirical.
L.A. is portrayed as a dangerous place for a woman. Some easy tactics, like posing personal ads on messaging forums and hacking her email to send explicit messages, can quickly ruin a woman’s life. Even the men who want to help Hope follow up their kindness with unsolicited advances. Skincare fails to address this important theme; it’s peppered through the plot yet never given the time the topic deserves. The police don’t believe her, and the stereotypical nice guys turn out to be not so nice. Yet, this is underplayed to an almost offensive level. Skincare is a movie about a woman who seems to ignore the perils of womanhood.
Director Austin Peters and co-writers Sam Freilich and Deering Regan ignore the open goal of satirising the beauty industry. Instead, Skincare deals with the fragility of running a business in a fickle industry, always looking for a new trend. The writing never mocks Hope and her customers, who use skincare treatments to mask their issues. But it feels a waste to set a crime thriller in such a specific industry without offering some commentary on the often toxic beauty world.
The messaging of Skincare is uneven and unsure of itself. The filmmakers appear confused about the assailants’ motives, not helped by the fact that the writers used an amalgam of two real-life people as the inspiration for their villain. In the end, it’s not clear who was good and who was bad, why they did it, or why audiences should care.
Despite its narrative flaws, Skincare looks good. Director Peters, cinematographer Christopher Ripley, and editor Laura Zempel create a bright world that is as inauthentic as the characters in the film. Using bold colours, obnoxious close-ups, and faded signs, this world feels exciting and aesthetically pleasing. The visual difference in Angel and Hope’s salons, one clean and minimal, the other bright and neon, is a smart way of introducing the two different styles of businesses in the industry. Much like Hope’s life, Skincare aesthetically pleases but delivers little beneath the surface.
Skincare is a frothy, thinly written thriller that never lives up to its wild source material. The script might have been more effective if it had leaned into the comedic, satirical aspects rather than playing out like a bland yet good-looking crime thriller. The nonsensical ending and last-minute crime twist manage to be both confusing and underwhelming.
ITALY • USA | 2024 | 96 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
director: Austin Peters.
writers: Sam Freilich, Deering Regan & Austin Peters.
starring: Elizabeth Banks, Lewis Pullman, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Luis Gerardo Méndez & Nathan Fillion.