British director Carine Adler makes a lyrically brutal debut with this story of a young woman who drowns the pain of her mother's death in a series of anonymous sexual encounters which grow increasingly obsessive and dangerous. Twenty-year-old Samantha Morton's performance as Iris goes far beyond the limits actors usually set for themselves; it's like watching the flame consume the candle. With her raccoon eyeliner and close-cropped hair, she looks street tough, but her skinny frame and lopsided baby face hint at an unbearable fragility below the surface. There's something else lurking below the surface, too, a weird, unresolved moralism, as if Iris needed some kind of traumatic excuse to indulge her own lusts, as if female sexuality were a pathology that needed to be explained. There's no question that Under the Skinis a first film: Adler too often indulges in obvious symbolism (intercutting Iris having sex with her mother's cremation) and the script's predictable downward spiral verges on fatalism. But the starkly hypnotic power of Adler's images (captured by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd) is undeniable, and she keeps her story pared to its incandescent core.