Marina de Van's debut feature is exceedingly gruesome. De Van writes, directs, and stars in this movie about a woman who develops a strange relationship with her own skin. While snooping around a colleague's backyard during a party, Esther slips and scrapes her leg. She doesn't notice how badly she's cut until she later sees bloody marks on the white carpet and is surprised to find that she made them. She's embarrassed and leaves before anyone else notices, but privately she's fascinated by her lack of feeling, which leads her to cut herself again, intentionally. She doesn't cut like a suicidal teenager, but stoically, as if she's carving her initials in a tree trunk.

This is merely the beginning, and as her fascination grows, as she begins to peel and gnaw at her skin and save pieces of it in her wallet, she has more and more trouble keeping this aspect of herself private, and I had more and more trouble keeping my hands from covering my eyes. Her boyfriend is troubled, thinking she's unhappy with him, although she doesn't otherwise seem to be. She's been promoted at work, but her compulsions endanger her new position. A dinner meeting where co-workers pick at the meat on their plates becomes unbearable.

This becomes the difficulty of the movie, that the character is impenetrable. She shows some fear of her loss of control but says very little. The climax, in which Esther hides away in a hotel room like she's having a tryst, is shown in split screen, with both sides prowling the room in extreme close-up. We get hints of what's going on — bloody footprints, knives, fingers — but the two images don't add up to a single complete picture. And so goes the movie: we see both the public and private sides of Esther's life, but that gives us only hints of why she feels this way about her body.

A number of French movies in recent years have explored our relationship to our flesh: the explicitly sexual movies by Catherine Breillat, the stylish but empty and revolting Irreversible by Gaspar Noë, and the benchmark as far as I'm concerned, Trouble Every Day by the great Claire Denis. Denis applies her sense of rhythm, visual poetry, and elliptical storytelling to a tale about vampire-cannibals and newlyweds and comes away with a movie about fear of intimacy. De Van has a less satisfying blend of elements, but her movie is still fascinating. She shoots scenes as if the limbs really are detached. Esther wakes up one morning with a numb arm, as everyone does sometimes, and it lies limp and unresponsive, even as she massages it with her good arm. Then a third arm reaches around to help, and this one really is detached. It's her boyfriend's. In fact some of the scenes of her cutting are shot in such tight close-up, that they could be love scenes, except that it's not a lover's arm she's nibbling, and it's more than a love bite. And of course there's the blood.

It's hard not to wonder why Esther does this. Does she feel guilty because she was promoted when her friend was passed over? At one point the camera crawls up an unidentified leg, surprising us with its clean, unbroken skin, but then the leg is revealed it to be the friend's, not Esther's, thus contrasting the two women. Or is it relevant that Esther preserves a swatch of skin using a CD jewel case, with the gleaming CD sitting in the tray opposite the rectangle of shriveled flesh. For twelve bucks you can get your own piece of an artist. But finally, I think, de Van is less interested in why Esther does this than that she must. We all have our private and public lives, and as much as we think they are separate, they aren't. They press on each other, and generally we keep them in their places, but we're all slaves to our bodies more than we'd like to admit.

De Van co-wrote Francois Ozon's Under the Sand about a woman whose husband simply disappears one day; she goes on with her life as if he's still there, as if he's the phantom twitch of a severed limb. It's curious that de Van puts herself so squarely in the middle of her directorial debut. I wonder if carrying screenplay ideas in your pocket, or spending long hours editing a movie in which your body appears in nearly every shot, is something like what Esther feels, strangely divorced from her own skin. Although I can't say I actually enjoyed it, De Van has produced an odd, thought-provoking work.