Your sense of smell and touch heighten throughout Simon Schneckenburger’s Skin on Skin, a desperately sexy and tragic short centering on two men who find connection in the ugliest place. This is a film about how feeling another person’s fingers on your body literally makes your body ignite with electricity. The time between those moments of touch, though, can feel almost suffocating.
In Germany, two displaced men work at a slaughterhouse in the dead of night. Jakob is a security guard whose superiors constantly tell him that he’s doing a bad job. The workers are not getting paid a consistent, proper wage, and someone even tells him that a dog would be a better fit. Boris works on the killing floor doing various things as large pigs hang upside down from the ceiling. Everyone is so numb to the death that stinks up the place that it’s unsettling to see.
The first moments of Schneckenburger’s film, though, are sweaty and passionate as Boris and Jakob finish a lovemaking session in the back of a car. The windows are steamed up, enclosing them in a cocoon of sex and tenderness. Outside of this car, they wouldn’t dare touch, even though Jakob flirts with the idea when he takes Boris out of line before work to do a routine body search around the corner where everyone else is filing in.
Schneckenburger does an incredible job of establishing the ugliness of this world. It’s sterile and feels physically cold with dirty tile and steel surrounding us. When we step outside, we feel the shrillness of the wind as the night presses in. The only smell that might mask the stench of death is the cigarette smoke from the frustrated, angry workers as Jakob keeps his head down. After a contentious fight with the workers of the slaughterhouse, Jakob sees a dead pig lying on its side on the ground. His fingers reach forward, and he touches its skin. Is there any warmth remaining? His hands are barely on the poor animal’s slimy skin before another worker spies him.
As Jakob, Jonas Smulders finds the balance between his character’s hidden neediness while retaining a convincing, tough exterior. When he is enjoying the afterglow of another encounter with Boris, you can almost hear the lightness in the sounds coming from his body. When he walks Boris home, I couldn’t help but think about how he looks at his lover’s home.
The sense of touch in Skin On Skin charges these men in the frigid cold until the next moment they can steal away. While one might consider that a depressing though, maybe we should try to let that heat catch fire?
Skin On Skin is playing virtually through October 12 on Out On Film’s programming.
