Austin Peters’s first fiction feature puts Elizabeth Banks in the chair of a Los Angeles aesthetician whose business, inbox and reputation come under attack in 2013, in a black-comedy thriller loosely based on the Dawn DaLuise case.

Skincare is a 2024 American thriller with a strong streak of black comedy, directed by Austin Peters and led by Elizabeth Banks as Hope Goldman, a celebrity facialist in Los Angeles who is days away from launching her own line of products when everything around her starts to come apart. Lewis Pullman, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Nathan Fillion complete the main cast of a film that runs 96 minutes and was released in American theaters by IFC Films on August 16, 2024.

The premise is compact and very specific to its world. Hope has spent years building a client list of the wealthy and the famous, she has a television segment lined up to promote her new range, and she has a studio she treats as an extension of her name. Then a rival opens a boutique directly across the street, and someone begins to use her own email account, her phone and the internet against her.

The story: a rival across the street and a stranger in her inbox

The trouble starts in small, humiliating steps. Hope receives an anonymous video of herself at work, followed by a threatening call. Her longtime client Colleen, played by Wendie Malick, tells her that a message sent from Hope’s address to all of her contacts claimed she was in debt, unstable and sexually frustrated, and appointments begin to cancel. Her promotional slot on The Brett & Kylie Show, the daytime program hosted by Nathan Fillion’s Brett Wright, is replaced by an interview with Angel Vergara, the new aesthetician across the street played by Luis Gerardo Méndez.

From there the harassment escalates: slashed tires, explicit messages, fake personal ads posted online that send strangers to her studio expecting sex, and a break-in at her home. The police and her landlord are unconvinced, the high-end clients drift toward the competition, and Hope becomes certain that Angel is behind all of it. She finds support in Jordan Weaver, a young self-styled life coach introduced to her by Colleen and played by Lewis Pullman, and in Armen, the mechanic who fixes her car, played by Erik Palladino. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez plays Marine, her assistant and publicist, the person closest to the business as it starts to lose its footing. How much of that support can be trusted is the question the thriller is built around, and it is better left for the film to answer.

The real case behind the film

Skincare is loosely inspired by the story of Dawn DaLuise, a Hollywood facialist who was arrested over an alleged murder-for-hire plot against a rival beauty specialist, Gabriel Suarez, and who was later acquitted. The case had everything a crime screenwriter looks for: a glamorous clientele, a feud between neighboring businesses, online harassment and an accusation of violence that seemed to come out of nowhere. The film changes names, characters and events, and it does not present itself as a reconstruction of the trial.

DaLuise herself made that distance clear when the film came out. She said she was disappointed that nobody had consulted her during production, while acknowledging that she enjoyed Banks’s performance and describing the film as a rollercoaster that was not fact-based in any real way. That is the honest frame for Skincare: a story that borrows the outline of a real scandal to build a fictional thriller, not a documentary account of what happened to the people involved.

The setting matters more than it might seem. The film takes place in Los Angeles in 2013, a moment when email was still the center of professional life, when online classifieds could be used to target a person, and when social media reputations were becoming a business asset that could be damaged overnight. Hope’s crisis belongs to that transitional period, before influencer culture had settled into its current form but after a single hacked inbox could already ruin a small company. Calling it a nineties throwback, as some early descriptions did, misses the point: the film is about the early years of the always-online economy.

Austin Peters’s first fiction feature

Austin Peters came to Skincare from music videos and documentaries. His previous feature-length work was Give Me Future, a documentary built around Major Lazer’s free concert in Havana, and Skincare is his first fiction feature as a director. He wrote the screenplay with Sam Freilich and Deering Regan, and the jump from music video to genre cinema is a familiar route in American independent film, where directors trained in short, visual formats often choose a contained thriller with a strong central performance as their first narrative project.

The production moved quickly. The cast was announced in June 2023, and shooting wrapped before the Writers Guild of America strike that paralyzed Hollywood that year. The film was produced by Jonathan Schwartz and the actor Logan Lerman, through Jalapeño Goat, the Italian company Iervolino & Lady Bacardi Entertainment and WWPS.TV. IFC Films acquired the North American distribution rights in June 2024 and released it two months later, in a wide-for-an-indie run of 760 theaters that earned $323,856 on its opening weekend and around $456,590 in total.

Behind the camera, the cinematography is by Christopher Ripley and the editing by Laura Zempel, while the score was written by Fatima Al Qadiri, the Kuwaiti electronic musician and composer whose film work includes the music for Mati Diop’s Atlantics. Choosing an artist from experimental electronic music to score a Los Angeles crime story is in line with Peters’s background in the music world.

Elizabeth Banks and a cast built for a pressure cooker

The film rests on Elizabeth Banks, and the choice says a lot about the project. Banks is known to a wide audience as Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games saga and as the producer and co-star of the Pitch Perfect franchise, and in recent years she has also built a career as a director with Pitch Perfect 2, Charlie’s Angels and Cocaine Bear. Skincare gives her something different: a lead role in a small, adult thriller where the whole story depends on how far the audience follows a character whose judgment is under constant strain. When the film opened, her performance was the element that drew the most attention.

Lewis Pullman, the son of actor Bill Pullman, arrived at Skincare after supporting roles in Bad Times at the El Royale and Top Gun: Maverick, and just before a run of larger parts that includes Salem’s Lot and Marvel‘s Thunderbolts*. Luis Gerardo Méndez, one of the most recognizable Mexican actors of his generation thanks to Club de Cuervos, had already worked with Banks in her Charlie’s Angels. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, known for playing Blanca in the series Pose, a role that earned her a Golden Globe, and Nathan Fillion, the star of Firefly, Castle and The Rookie, add two very different television profiles to the mix. Wendie Malick, Erik Palladino and John Billingsley round out the supporting cast.

Where Skincare sits

Skincare belongs to a tradition of Los Angeles crime stories that use the city’s service industries, its beauty clinics, talent agencies and morning shows, as a stage for envy and status anxiety. What sets it apart is the specific trade at its center: skincare as a business built entirely on trust, where a client lets someone touch their face and a rumor can empty the appointment book in a week. The genre label it carries, a black comedy mystery thriller, describes a film that wants to keep the tension of a stalker story while acknowledging the absurd side of a feud between two facialists.

It is also a modest film, made on an independent scale and released to a limited audience, which makes it a good candidate for discovery at home rather than a title that defined its year. Its ambitions are clear and contained: a strong lead role for Banks, a rising actor in Pullman, a real case as a starting point and a first-time fiction director testing himself in a genre that rewards economy.

For anyone curious about the period when the internet first turned into a weapon against small businesses and personal reputations, or about how Elizabeth Banks chooses her roles outside the big franchises, Skincare is a reasonable place to look. It does not claim to be more than a sharp, self-aware thriller about a woman fighting to keep her name, and on those terms it is a project worth knowing about.

Tags: thrillers, Elizabeth Banks