Gels Will Not Save ‘The Serpent's Skin’
Alice Maio Mackay has the witches, the vampires, and the pink glowing eyes. What she does not have is a reason for any of it.
I’m all for queer 22-year-olds making movies, and in theory this should be right up my alley, with the fantasy turn, the pink glowy eyes, witches and vampires and all that. So why haven’t I vibed with this?
The Serpent’s Skin tells the story of Anna, a trans girl who runs away from her hometown and her oppressive parents to live with her sister. In her new town, she meets Danny, the vamp fuckboy, and Gen, who bonds with her romantically and helps her connect with her inner witchy powers. Also tapped into the supernatural realm, Gen’s powers spiral out of control and summon unwanted demons.
The Serpent’s Skin (2025), dir. Alice Maio Mackay
Am I turned off by the bad technique? I feel bad saying that about someone so young, who clearly hasn’t had enough lifetime yet to watch a lot of movies. I’m all for urgent films though, and for learning as you go, and for making honest mistakes along the way. But everything here is bad: the lazy storytelling (no motivation, no tension, all actions empty, all dialogues uninteresting), the awful close-ups, the soulless acting, the mind-numbingly boring soundtrack (“we didn’t even try,” says the young musician). Is it meant to be ironic? Is the filmmaker deliberately “not even trying” to make something worth watching? Sometimes it feels like it’s trying to ride Jane Schoenbrun’s wave, but if Schoenbrun’s work reads as effortless in the final product, we know it takes a whole lot of serious work, and a bit of genius, to get there. This film feels like lazy homework from the kind of kid who thinks they’re deeper than everyone else but actually isn’t, a film that sounds like a teenager whining. Everyone understands how lame old people are. Everyone understands how messed up society is. Welcome to the world, kid.
The Serpent’s Skin (2025), dir. Alice Maio Mackay
Also, can we actually talk about giallo lighting? The mixed-gel craze? It’s become for queer filmmakers what cheap black-and-white is for bad erotic photoshoots. Just because those gels make everything look kind of cool doesn’t mean you get to stop studying cinematography altogether. Gels will not save your ugly movie.
We do need portraits of alternative queer lives, of finding meaning in community. And I definitely need more weird witchy pink eyes, campy dialogue, and kitsch devils. And for once, this is an actually horny movie from Gen Z: the sequence in the middle, with the parallel montage of two couples having sex, is genuinely pretty good, though it works as a music video and as a representation of sex more than as an actual film scene; artistically, it’s still badly framed, lit, and scored.
It’s hard to get past the mix of disenchanted line deliveries saying the dumbest dialogue with the most self-important tone (“you beautiful idiot, you didn’t hurt me”, really?) or the fact that it ends on “Our life is so fucking weird / Great, isn’t it.” Oh, cringe. Been there, done that, kid. It would’ve had to go much further to actually be funny. It could have gone to the Demon Twink territory (the acting’s worse there, but at least it’s short, has real storytelling, and is campy enough to earn some laughs), or much more serious to touch something real (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair). But the way it is, no, thanks.
