Let’s hope that Comforting Skin doesn’t get lost in the glut of no-budget genre product out there, because this film has serious talent on both sides of the camera.

For starters, Victoria Bidewell takes the lead role of Koffee—a plain, self-loathing, and increasingly disturbed 20-something with some psychological issue in her past—and then inhabits it with the kind of conviction and aplomb that you’d see in something with ten times the budget. She also makes you care about the poor creature.

And believe me, some of the things the frequently naked actor does in this film—like thrashing around in the kind of violent erotic delirium that would make the late Jess Franco stand to attention—could have gone very, very wrong. Instead, in concert with the film’s minimalist tone, and Adam Sliwinski’s gorgeously bleak photography, her performance works, absolutely.

It’s a much less demonstrative part, but Tygh Runyon is every bit as good as her smart-alecky and agoraphobic roommate, Nathan, and their interactions have the authentic rhythm and humour of a real friendship.

All of this comes inside a raunchy psychological horror film wherein a new tattoo—which initially lifts Koffee out of her depression—seemingly comes to life, with (surprise!) dire results. And here, first time writer-director Derek Franson visualizes the film’s effects with artful restraint, even as Koffee’s madness and Alain Mayrand’s gothic piano score both reach an operatic pitch.

You might say the powerful results fall somewhere between Repulsion and Andrzej Zulawski's notorious 1981 film, Possession, which is some pretty damn creepy territory. That a film made locally for pennies can be this good is the only comforting thing about it.

Comforting Skin screens for one night only at the Rio Theatre, on Sunday (April 7)