Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Chris Smith (RockPortReview) The 2009 Australian film "In Her Skin" is based on a true story of a mentally unstable woman and her obsession with a neighbor girls perfect life. Its a story of two families dealing with heartbreak, class structures, self esteem and who is to blame.Guy Pearce and Miranda Otto play Mike and Elizabeth Barber the upper middle class parents of Rachel, a 15 year old Dancer, who goes missing after accepting a job from an estranged older friend named Caroline, played fearlessly by Ruth Bradley. The girls exist at opposite ends of the class and popularity spectrum. Rachel is young and beautiful with and equally beautiful boyfriend. She has two loving parents and a normal home life. While Caroline, who is in her early to mid 20s, lives alone in an apartment always on the brink of some kind of mental breakdown. Her parents are divorced and her father has long given up hope of having a "normal" daughter. He has had learn to just deal with her craziness after having to bail her out of situations her whole life. Caroline works a dull and dreary office job with little to no motivation to do anything more with her life. Rachel has been a sort of obsession and role model of hers every since she babysat for her years back. An idealized version of what she wish she could be. Caroline feels trapped and cursed to roam the earth in her overweight and unattractive body. She is unloved and unwanted. We can only watch as the clock ticks forward to an enviable breakdown. After Rachel doesn't return home one afternoon. Her parent start to worry and call her friends and the dance studio with no luck. They go to the police but are devastated to be told that Rachel must have ran away or is just out on a bender and will probably show up in a day or two. With all of the other more important cases, they can't be wasting their precious recourses on a missing teenage girl. Mike and Elizabeth do eventually find an investigator dedicated to finding what happen to Rachel and it all leads back to Caroline.The film is uniquely structured in that it is split up into three sections dealing with the individual characters view points and personal struggles. After a brief intro we start with a title card "Mike and Elizabeth", Then go on to "Caroline", then finally "Rachel". The resulting story is raw, honest, and heartbreaking. It is superbly acted by all involved and unlike most Hollywood studio movies doesn't offer any easy answers.

Raphael Teixeira This is a very intense thriller and drama movie. Carolyn (Ruth Bradley) scary me, Miranda Otto she so perfect on the character of mother. Great actors, intense history and good direction.The film is based on the true story of Melbourne teenager Rachel Barber who was murdered in 1999 by Caroline Reed Robertson. I knew this going into the film and surprisingly, it doesn't take anything away from this thriller.The performances by Guy Pearce and Miranda Otto are painful to watch at times because they're so believable. The way in which they cope with their daughter's disappearance is a stark contrast with Sam Neil's performance as Caroline's father. He sees Caroline as a nuisance.

Robert J. Maxwell It's based on real events from the 1990s in Melbourne and is quite well done. Ruth Bradley is Caroline, a former baby sitter for a middle-class couple, Guy Pearce and Miranda Otto. The eldest of the couple's children is Rachel, played by Kate Bell. Rachel is only in her mid-teens but has everything a girl requires -- beauty, curiosity, love, and talent. One can only gasp at her impeccable entre chats.Ruth Bradley couldn't have been a better choice for the role of the half-mad and insanely envious Caroline, who murders Rachel and buries her body on a farm. Bradley isn't ugly. The movie isn't that simple minded. But her features are plain, as they are with most of us, and there is only the hint of the demonic in her eyes. Of course she's made up to look more ordinary than she is, what with her stringy hair and pale face. She's a competent actress as well.And her figure is that of a walking survival system. She's chubby all over, which would help her during a famine, and her breasts are over-sized and pendulous. She could reproduce to beat the band. Totally unattractive in today's world of models, but the dream of a Victorian gentleman or a Neanderthal, a Venus of Willendorf.Psychologically, however, she's full of problems, aside from the distress over cosmetic issues. She's sloppy, an epileptic, and suffers from bouts of depression. And there are moments when she is as brutal as a five-year-old child. It's a complex portrait. The murder is brutal and graphic. She strangles the gorgeous young Rachel and mutilates the body but there's an element of helplessness about her most heinous acts.Pearce and Otto, as Rachel's parents, don't have very much to do but the viewer is at least spared an excess of hysteria as they persistently prod the police to investigate what they believe is Rachel's disappearance and the cops think is a simple case of a runaway.Sam Neill is Caroline's estranged and vitiated father who loves his crazy daughter but is depressed and at his wit's end. When he's visited by the police and asked if his daughter might have had something to do with Rachel's disappearance, he pauses and replies, "In light of what you've just said, I have to say I'm deeply concerned." Neill's performance is a gem. His forte is thoughtfulness rather than strength and the role plays directly into his talents.Women like Caroline who are overdeveloped and unattractive according to the norms established by Vogue and Cosmopolitan models have reason for their unhappiness. From an evolutionary point of view, what females have traditionally had to offer is beauty, youth, and fecundity. Unattractive men can compensate by being powerful or rich. For millions of years, females have had to be selective about their mating. They're born with all the eggs they're ever going to have, about three hundred, and every pregnancy represents an enormous investment. The best mate is one who is both potent and protective. A woman who is born without the most desirable attributes has good reason to be depressed, though, as if in compensation, there are always males available who are not handsome, powerful, or rich. Caroline's difficulties included not only an elephantine figure but a lack of patience.It's not without weaknesses: sluggish in parts, and a solution too quickly arrived at. We never get to see much development in Rachel's character. In any case, this is a splendidly executed film, not just by the performers but by the photographer and the writer/director, Simone North. A lot of talent on display here. Good on them.

perkypops Anyone whose child has gone missing, even momentarily, will connect with the earliest moments of this version of true events, but, perhaps only those for whom the loss remains unresolved for any serious length of time will know how close to their reality this film touches. It is almost relentlessly tough to watch because there is no place for pressure to be relieved, however briefly, by a joke, a glimmer of hope, a slither of a flaw to make us remember we are watching a dramatised version of events. I even find it tough to judge the quality of the acting because too often this film seems so vividly, so uncomfortably, and so chillingly real. I am, if truth be told, just in awe of all the performances I have witnessed and I still have to pinch myself to remember it was "just a film". Is that a compliment?I felt tears on my cheeks three times during this film, not because I was sad, but because my being had to have an outlet and I couldn't laugh or smile. The emptiness, pointlessness, coldness, loneliness of a missing loved one is so bitingly portrayed and yet saying "okay that's enough, I have got your point" is as futile as the parents of Rachel Barber shouting "Rachel come home" on every street corner they could.I remember Hitchcock being heavily criticised by some in the industry for a seven minute killing sequence in "Torn Curtain" when that was easier to justify because it was a work of fiction and a thriller rather than "a week or so in the real life of a family". And so I had mixed feelings about "I Am You" when I reflected on some of the things I had seen, including the closing statements popular with "factual" drama.I am left with these mixed feelings ranging from the reality of the acting to the old adage that imagination is always more powerful than a picture, from the top to the bottom of the things I should feel. And ultimately I cannot give this film a points score because it doesn't feel like it entered the cinematic league stakes. It is a film and if you see it you will feel what it does to you rather than want to talk about to friends. And that IS tough.