It’s always a flex when a movie starts with a hot, sweaty, desperate sex scene. While it’s probably impossible for anyone to beat the iconic start of Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986), Simon Schneckenburger gives it his best shot with the opening of his excellent 30-minute short Skin on Skin (2025). Shot in the backseat of a car, the windows frosting over, everything caught in a red and blueish hue, we see two men clinging closely to one another in the act of frantic intercourse. Already from the push and pull of the way they interact, we can see how complicated their relationship is — craving intimacy yet also terrified of it.
The real question that the miserable yet deeply human Skin on Skin asks is: are we human, or are we just meat? Like the lonely protagonist of Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978), who worked in an abattoir, our hero, security guard Jakob (Jonas Smulders), is deeply alienated by his work in a pig slaughterhouse. His only reprieve is his passionate attraction for Bosnian gastarbeiter Boris (Jurij Drevenšek), with whom he shares a problematic relationship, considering he is also manning the security gates when the mostly-Balkan workforce arrive for the night shift.
I don’t know if Schneckenburger is purposefully inviting the comparisons, but the yelling, meanness and racism of the German higher-ups here towards the Slavic (and Romanian) workforce — including withholding their passports and carting them in tiny vans — seems to evoke the worst kind of images about the nation’s past. This is a deeply mean, miserable world; shot on film but with a greasy feel, as if the pig fat has been smudged on the celluloid.
Soon, the personal relationship between Jakob and Boris comes into conflict with the wider issues of worker exploitation, Schneckenburger showing off a fantastic sense of scale that easily demonstrates a high capability to move on to features. Yet what is especially impressive is how, despite the awfulness of the world he has created, we always feel his compassion for the characters, a testament to the very physical and powerful presence of both Smulders and Drevenšek.
Work might be tough, life might be pain, but amidst the horror, tenderness can prevail.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.