When a main character in any movie states, "I've got insanity in my entrails," it might lead you to believe that that character is going to have the weirdest story line in the film.
Or you could be watching something by Pedro Almodovar. Audacity is practically this guy's middle name.
That line is uttered by mad scientist Antonio Banderas's housekeeper and accomplice, Marisa Paredes. She's helping him maintain the kidnapping-plot-turned-medical-experiment-turned-remake-of-Vertigo that he's got going on in his home surgery theater/art-filled prison cell (his female victim studies books about the late artist Louise Bourgeois, whose influential work was partly inspired by her complicated relationship with her father and his sexual secrets). But it's not Paredes who's crazy. Well, okay, it is. But everybody else here is even more effed up. Way more.
To say anything else about the increasingly weird, unpredictable and convoluted plot details of this beauty-obsessed, Spanish mash-up of Eyes Without a Face, Bride of Frankenstein and The Human Centipede (minus the feces) would be unsportsmanlike. But the basic premise is that brilliant, obsessive, cosmetic surgeon Antonio Banderas, having lost both his wife and daughter to horrible tragedies, sets out to create both a synthetic, damage-resistant skin as well as a personal replacement for lost familial affection. And he needs a guinea pig. So when he finds one, a trippy, sexual, years-long game of Operation begins.
It's an amoral parade of opium, tiger costumes, body violation and fixation, murder, fire, car accidents, disfigurement, revenge, art, surgery, saxophone solos, tranquilizer guns, regular guns, body stockings, latex masks, genitals-gone-crazy, self-immolation and yoga.
And if that sounds like too much, then remember that this is a film by Almodovar, where everything sick and sicker is still pretty to look at. And if it also sounds like it flies off the rails in the third act resolution department, then you're more or less right. And when you gaze at it for long enough and still can't figure out the Why of it all, or if you believe that the Why is lost deep in the movie's insane entrails, then that's also probably true. But, then again, puzzles are meant to be pored over, not easily finished and discarded.
Look, nobody ever said being a mad scientist was going to make perfect sense.