Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
The film is a strange one, not exactly inaccessible but I also struggle to discern what it is it aimed to communicate. Half way through watching it the man a few seats from me clambered passed towards the exit, muttering and grumbling that he “can’t take any more of this.” There were only five of us left in the cinema, and throughout this strange and somewhat disillusioning experience a fly was incessantly buzzing behind the screen. And so my thoughts of this film are somewhat loose and unfocused, but what I’m left with is the feeling that Deerskin speaks of some kind of morbid disconnect— psychic and societal— where a man utterly detaches himself from all he was previously tied down to, throwing himself into one obsession that latches onto his every fibre. The deerskin jacket becomes his companion, a second skin, the spur to prick the sides of his intent. He gives the jacket a voice and willingly submits himself to its commands and dreams. It seems he has no past— we know nothing of how he came to stumble into this remote town encircled by mountains. Here, subservient to his beloved deerskin jacket, he develops a dangerously skewed conception of what is important, seemingly oblivious to the absurdity of his fixations, and the depravity in where they lead him. Morbid, absurd, preoccupied with ideas of fixation, emotional estrangement and crazed obsessions, Deerskin is an absurd dream, a tragedy threaded together by a strangely grotesque humour. It weaves a tale of casual insanity spawned from excessive preoccupations with materiality, a narcissism that amplifies this strange fusion of being both unhinged and nonchalant. We are left with a man dressed head to foot in 100% deerskin, shrugging casually amidst the blood and carnage he so unaffectedly leaves in his wake, until he too is subject to the same violence, all spawning from his distorted worship of a deerskin jacket.