Director Austin Peters makes his narrative feature debut with “Skincare,” a slice of nasty L.A. noir set within the beauty industry, starring Elizabeth Banks as a celebrity aesthetician whose reputation crumbles around her over the course of two weeks.
The film calls to mind other dark, salacious thrillers that satirize a city seemingly obsessed with image — think of “Nightcrawler” or even “American Gigolo” — and Peters wields the style and tone of this subgenre with skill. The sunbaked Los Angeles of “Skincare” is not the glowing, golden fantasy that we often seen on screen, an impossibly beautiful escapist fantasy. No, the light in “Skincare” is harsh and revealing: bright UV rays, fluorescent bulbs and neon signs beating down on the face of Hope Goldman (Banks), a facialist with a high-profile client list who’s on the verge of breaking through to the big time with her own skincare line.
Hope has been desperate to keep up appearances with her product launch, taping a TV segment that she expects will catapult her into fame and fortune, but as we come to find out, her finances are in disarray. She’s behind on the rent for her storefront and spa in the iconically kitschy Crossroads of the World complex in Hollywood, and when a competing aesthetician, Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez), sets up shop on her turf, an already frazzled Hope begins to unravel. But Hope’s undoing isn’t entirely her fault: A mysterious stalker simultaneously starts to interf.