The persistence of body-swapping as a plot device — “Freaky Friday,” “Being John Malkovich,” the recent “Jumanji” series — suggests something profound: We ache to know who we’d be if we inhabited someone else’s body. It’s a serious question, but onscreen it tends to turn into a comic showcase for the actors, who get to revel in performing the incongruity of one stable, established self invading another. Physical bodies are treated as vessels; the “real” you is in some nonphysical self that can jump blithely around.
“Skin Deep,” directed by Alex Schaad, has something more philosophically profound on its mind. A reflective bit of realism wrapped in science fiction, it starts from a simple premise: What if you could go to a body-swapping retreat? The point here isn’t comedy, nor is it the mechanics, the science, or the plausibility of any of it. With the ability to switch taken for granted, it goes deeper into its premise, emerging with unsettling and profound thoughts about love, and trauma, and gender, and intimacy.
I don’t want to rob you of this movie’s pleasure of skillfully constructed discovery. “Skin Deep” unfolds without hurry. What I can say is that it centers on Leyla (Mala Emde) and Tristan (Jonas Dassler), who love one another deeply but have hit one of those indescribable rough patches brought on by not quite being able to connect as they once did. They’ve boarded a ferry and headed to a two-week retreat on a tranquil remote island, invited by an old university friend of Leyla’s. Once there, the strangeness begins. “What is this place?” Tristan asks, but Leyla does not quite know.
Perhaps the plot is better left there. Schaad wisely constructed “Skin Deep,” a movie about trying on someone else’s view from the inside, to replicate that experience as much as possible for the audience. Much of the film is shot with a hand-held camera, which gives the audience a sense of intimacy, as if we’re present in the room, another character in the drama. The choice to only gradually unfurl what’s going on — there are no clunky expository speeches here to establish the rules of the world for us — draws us in. We’re right there with Leyla and Tristan, just trying to figure out what is happening. Strong performances by Emde and Dassler, along with Dimitrij Schaad, Maryam Zaree, and in particular Thomas Wodianka, make the swapping less funny and more moving.
But once you’ve accepted the more fantastical trappings, the film moves into a different mode. There are metaphors for body image issues and for the experiences of transgender people, rendered in a way that feels unforced. Each swap brings new questions. If you loved someone, and they were suffering, what would it mean to give them your body? If your lover finally felt like themselves in a new body — even one of a different sex — would that change your relationship? When we love someone, what does that actually mean? We love their body? Their soul? Are they even separable?
You can sense Descartes getting interested, but “Skin Deep” isn’t merely probing the mind-body connection. That’s certainly part of it. In one conversation, two characters inhabiting new bodies talk about where the self really resides. “Our so-called self is a very fragile concept,” one tells the other, noting that the biochemical and hormonal systems of the body shift and alter one’s moods, inclinations and desires. “You are the person you are because of the body you have,” the person continues. The answer to the age-old question — am “I,” so to speak, actually a product of my thoughts, or my physical presence, or both, or neither — is, in this film, simply “yes.”
But Schaad’s focus isn’t just on poking around at philosophical ideas about the seat of the self. That’s just a start. The real question for this film is more personal, more humane — what does the self have to do with others? 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.
Skin Deep
Not rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
