Sunshine noir is given an unsettling spin in new film ‘Skincare’; meet the director

Facialist to the stars Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is convinced someone is out to get her. Poised to launch a new skincare line, she is caught in a cycle of sabotage, at the mercy of email hacks and a hot, client-stealing new esthetician who has set up shop across the road.

For director and writer Austin Peters, it is a story ripe with ominous undertones, told through an artificially bright and uncanny lens. Best known as a music video director – for artists including Haim, Charli XCX, Bastille, Major Lazer, Chvrches and Diplo – Peters brings his docu-drama style to the film, which zigzags around Los Angeles in a frenetic foretelling of Goldman’s collapse.

‘I tend to think very musically, and so it's something that has been building in my mind since we started working on this script,’ says Peters on the colour, sound and almost fairytale style of the film. ‘There were certain things I knew I wanted it to have, such as the Queens of the Stone Age song, which opens the film as [Hope] gives a facial, because I felt like the contrast of those things would really set up that character and introduce you to what the world of the film felt like.

‘Being in a city and being in Los Angeles, everywhere you go you hear different kinds of music, and even though it is very isolating and very lonely, that is one thing which is constantly being reflected to you, in the way that you hear music in a coffee shop or in a car as it's driving by or on the radio.’

Peters is adept at negotiating a natural compromise between the visual and the narrative, here using the former to feed into the latter. A palette of pastels, heavily inspired by American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia, lends the more sinister undertones of the film a surreal reality.

‘With music videos, you have such a tight turnaround, and not enough money or time, which is exactly like making an independent film – and what you end up with is what you end up with. If it's not good, the artist just won't put it out, and then that's your fault. No one else will take responsibility for that. So all of us were used to working in this really heightened way, where you're unable to compromise on image, but you still have to deliver despite the restrictions.

‘But this is such a different process, with actors, and that's such a joy for me. When you do a music video, different artists care at different levels about it. For some of them, it's really crucial and a real part of their story, but it's always responding to something that they've already created in the studio, or when they wrote the song. With an actor, their moments of creation are on the set, it’s actually happening when you're there and that feels like lightning striking. It's so exciting.’

The film traces the topical climate of today – cancel culture, digital alienation – back to when the issues were burgeoning, with Peters choosing to set the film in the recent past of 2013.

‘When we go into the recent past, we see why certain things are emerging in our future, and I think that is one of the main reasons why I didn’t just make it contemporary, which would have been much easier logistically, especially for an independent film. But it felt so critical that the internet had to be where it was at that time. Now we're so much more conditioned to the ways that we can be hacked and the bad things that can happen to us on the internet, and there's more of a line of defence that people around us can understand. But with the certain things that happen to this character, in 2013 it would have really felt like the sky is falling. It is the absolute worst possible thing that can happen, whereas now I think everyone's quite used to being hacked.’

Sunshine noir is a natural medium through which to express this atmosphere of unsettling violation, with Los Angeles’ underbelly glimpsed through the upbeat soundtrack and vibrant sets. ‘It often feels like what we see of Los Angeles is the aspirational version,’ Peters adds, ‘or the Emperor's new clothes, a ridiculous fun-house mirror. We really wanted it to feel like a city and a very gritty place, which is what it feels like when you're there.’

Skincare, courtesy of Universal Pictures Content Group, is available on digital release from 11 November 2024

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