You don’t want to miss ‘In My Skin’

Dark, funny and heartbreaking, “In My Skin” begins streaming on Hulu. Produced in Wales and originally seen on BBC Three, “Skin” offers a remarkably frank account of a young woman faced with responsibilities well beyond her years and forced to be “the grownup” even as she’s figuring out her own personality.

When we first meet 16-year-old Bethan (Gabrielle Creevy), she’s talking trash with her cynical friends Travis (James Wilbraham), gay and witty, and Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar), a pretty blonde trying desperately to affect disenchantment. A drinking bout gives way to pills, euphoria, nausea and vomiting. Oh, to be 16.

But Bethan has no time for hangovers. Soon after returning home, she’s awakened by chaos in the street. Her bipolar mother, Katrina (Jo Hartley), has had an episode and awakened the neighborhood.

Bethan’s need to mother her mother and see that she’s readmitted to a psychiatric facility is a byproduct of her deadbeat dad’s (Rhodri Meilir) alcoholism and porn-addiction. She hates him and tells him as much. Her grandmother (Di Botcher) means well, but offers little practical help.

As grim as this all sounds, “Skin” moves along propelled by black comedy. One of the other patients in Bethan’s mother’s ward wears a blue tuxedo for no apparent reason and appears obsessed by the early albums of Charlotte Church. In another “teen” comedy, Bethan might be cruel or dismissive, but in her compartmentalized world, such characters pass for normal.

The real brilliance of “Skin” and of Creevy’s performance is her ability to hide all of this from her peers and project a jaded nonchalance around her teachers and fellow students.

In their unkempt hair and rumpled uniforms, Bethan and Lydia would not be out of place in “To Sir With Love.” There’s a searing honesty to “In My Skin” and its depiction of “those schoolgirl days” that transcends any era.

› The pandemic quarantine has been a fright for many. And now it has inspired a horror movie. The Shudder streaming

service presents “Host,” a horror movie shot entirely on a Zoom feed. Directed by Rob Savage (“Dawn of the Deaf”), the film’s cast (including Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Edward Linard, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward and Emma Louise Webb) performed from the socially distanced comforts of their own homes and screens, and did

most of their own special effects.

The story involves friends gathering remotely for a screen seance. What could go wrong?

Shudder is a niche streaming service devoted to horror, available for a small monthly fee.