everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Disturbing yet enthralling

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

After the accidental death of their six-year-old daughter, the Hughes family escape their busy upscale suburban life and head to their isolated cottage for some quality time. An evening with their friendly neighbours is suddenly interrupted when one mans obsession with perfection escalates into a violent struggle.This forces the families to go beyond what they ever thought they were capable of in order to survive.......First off, never get friendly with a man who drops off wood for no reason outside your door at an unearthly hour. He is going to be a nutter.Secondly, you are going through the grieving process, why invite a family round for dinner?This, and many other questions go unanswered in this mundane, wannabe house invasion thriller, which tries to hark back to Funny Games, and Desperate Hours, but just becomes desperate.The characters are boring, wholly unlikable, and bitter, and by the second act, you couldn't care less who survives and who buys it.The acting is mundane, Blair looks like she's been dug up, and the rest of the cast falter.Stick with Haneke's Funny Games, either version is better than this.

"In Their Skin" is another movie that came and went without anyone paying too much attention to it and while it's not likely to win any Oscars it's still a pretty good genre picture, in this case 'the family menaced in their home by malevolent neighbours'. The couple are Joshua Close, (he also wrote the script), and an excellent Selma Blair and, let's just say, they aren't wanting for a penny while the vicious couple who treat them very badly indeed are Rachel Miner and a very creepy James D'Arcy. If the film has a fault it's that D'Arcy and Miner are such obvious nut-jobs from the first time we see them any self-respecting couple who meets them should run in the opposite direction as fast as possible and anyone who's seen either version of Michael Haneke's "Funny Games", (both vastly superior to this), should know what to expect. Still, this delivers the requisite frissons and chills and should make you think twice before spending your vacation in a lonely house in the middle of nowhere.

...despite a somewhat suspect plot that raises a few too many questions that aren't satisfactorily addressed, "In Their Skin" manages to transcend its flaws to deliver a reasonably creepy psycho-thriller. Primarily it's the third act where everything falls apart. Premise: a young yuppie family has retreated to a summer home to work through the grief of losing a daughter, only to be tormented by an invasive mirror family of head cases who want to usurp their identities. We get to know our protagonists in Act I, we meet the antagonists in Act II, and things play out in the closing Act III. All well and good; classic Syd Field stuff. The cast is mostly on the ball, the lensing and lighting well done, effective helming from its tyro director/co-writer; there's much to like in this film.However, as mentioned, things fall apart as what started out as a slow- burning tension builder devolves into a disappointingly routine assault on our protagonists, replete with numerous stupid moves on the part of characters who've apparently never seen movies like this one before. The most egregious failures involve a lack of explanation/willing suspension of disbelief concerning the antagonist "family." They simply don't behave like real people; they're authorial constructs only. They have no real background, no internal consistency, and it doesn't take an audience long to figure out they have no likely future, either. One can only wonder how this trio's leader subverted his followers into his dementia.Ultimately, "In Their Skin" fails to pack the punch of progenitors like "Funny Games" or "Last House on the Left." It's not a terrible watch, but it's far from essential, or even recommended. Check out one of the two I just mentioned instead.

This is NOT a Funny Games knock off as implied by another review. Funny Games was making more of a statement with the fact that people love horror movies and they don't care who it is, who they are, they just seem to want to see people get murdered.This movie was completely different. There was no statement about society being made here. The story is of a couple and their son, who go away to their cottage home for a getaway following the death of their daughter, which is still a fresh "wound"...Then the main family gets a knock early in the morning from very peculiar and nosy imposters who are way too interested and eager to learn all about the family. The family figures this out and ask them to leave. This is where the movie turns violent. Rachel Miner is fantastic in this movie role. There is a scene where Selma Blair is crying hysterically on the floor and Rachel is mimicking her every move. It is extremely frightening. I watch horror and gore movies all the time, but this movie left me unsettled, frightened, checking every lock and covering the windows. I have ONLY 2 criticisms for this movie. The first is that Rachel Miner's character talks about her life before her husband so briefly, I felt there should have been more to that, in order to care about a character, we must know about a character and in this case we knew too little. The second criticism is that the main character/homeowner/father had the gun pointed on the imposter guy a few times. He always held the gun on him, he should have shot him. Don't you hate it when people in movies don't shoot? I know I do.My score is 9. Not perfect. But almost.