The Weird and the Eerie in Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In: an examination of the film’s musical score
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/fotocinema.32.2026.21486Keywords:
weird, eerie, unheimlich, The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar, Alberto IglesiasAbstract
This article examines how the weird and eerie is communicated in Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, 2011) using its musical score, composed by Alberto Iglesias. Employing Mark Fisher's concepts of the weird and the eerie in respect to Freud’s unheimlich, the present work analyses how the score amplifies these qualities throughout the film. Focusing on the use of instrumentation, dissonance and leitmotifs, this research aims to establish how Iglesias' score reinforces the film's unsettling tone to create an atmosphere of strangeness and unease. This analysis leads into a discussion of how these elements can be linked to the film’s exploration of identity, the body and trauma. This work argues that the music in this film not only accompanies the action but also introduces a psychological dimension that intensifies the film’s sense of unreality and the latent violence in its narrative. In addition, the present article considers how the film’s visual aesthetics interact with the score to generate a sensory experience that underlines the three key concepts explored here: weirdness, eeriness and the unheimlich.
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