Skincare

In March 2014, Los Angeles County detectives arrested Dawn DaLuise, a celebrity esthetician with a salon in West Hollywood, accused of trying to hire a hitman to kill the man who'd opened a rival salon right next door. She spent ten months in jail before a jury acquitted her after deliberating for about an hour. That case is the starting point for 'Skincare', the first fiction feature from music video director Austin Peters, who calls it a work of fiction inspired by headlines rather than a retelling of what happened.

Hollywood, 2013. Hope Goldman is the esthetician the stars go to, and she's about to launch her own skincare line, with a TV spot lined up to promote it. Then Angel Vergara opens a clinic across the street and starts poaching her clients. Soon after, someone sends an email from her account to everyone in her contacts making her sound broke and falling apart, and the cancellations pour in.

Next come the slashed tyres, sex ads listing her studio's address and the loss of her TV segment, which goes to Angel. Neither the police nor her landlord take her seriously, so Hope, helped by Jordan, a life coach she meets through a client, sets out to find out for herself who wants to ruin her. The harder she pulls at the thread, the more the paranoia takes over.

Peters and his fellow screenwriters, Sam Freilich and Deering Regan, wrote the part for an Elizabeth Banks type, and the star of 'The Hunger Games' signed on as soon as she'd read the script. She learned to give facials from an esthetician in Studio City. Lewis Pullman plays Jordan and Luis Gerardo Méndez, Chava in 'Club de Cuervos', is Angel, alongside Nathan Fillion, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Wendie Malick. It was shot in just 18 days in the real Hollywood, with the Crossroads of the World mall on Sunset Boulevard housing both salons. Peters calls it sunshine noir.

IFC Films opened it in US cinemas on 16 August 2024, where it barely made a ripple and took under half a million dollars. In the UK it went to digital platforms through Universal. Critics were kinder to Banks than to the script, and several found the shifts between satire and thriller a little clumsy. The real DaLuise wasn't impressed: she was sorry no one had consulted her and said the film isn't based on the facts.

• Thriller
• Drama
• Comedy