The Reflecting Skin (1990)

i made the mistake of judging 'the reflecting skin' by its compelling box image. terrible child actors, slow pace, depressing storyline, inane and clumsy symbolism. ugh. weak.

Fmovies: Heartrendingly beautiful scenes of too-golden wheat fields. Also shattering in its disturbing imagery and subject matter. Solidly acted by all concerned. This film really needs to be on DVD! Hey! Get it done already! It's a crime to have to watch this on inferior VHS media. The world of childhood encounters the horrifying adult world in a series of inexplicable tragedies and horrendous crimes. Emotionally charged for anyone who remembers what it's like to be a child peering into the Pandora's's box of mature reality with all it's terrifying dangers, from which children are normally sheltered. Here the worlds collide with devastating impact; and yet, as the tag line states, it's all quite natural and must be taken in stride in order to encounter life in a meaningful way. Yes, children, life is full of lunacy, failure, cruelty, persecution, suicides, murderers, death and decay. Welcome to our life. The ultimate answer to the Simple Plan song, the fact is that, Yes we all know what it's like, because we all have to live it; your experience is not some uniquely tragic exception, it's just the universal, horrifying reality. Thank God that most of the time we don't have to face it, and life is good. But, to take a poignant line from Grand Canyon, "If you live long enough, some awful bad (stuff's) gonna happen to ya."

The Reflecting Skin is, by far, the best film I have ever seen.

The film is about a young 8-year-old boy named Seth Dove, who leads a fairly normal childhood in the prairie farmlands of the 1950's.

When a friend is murdered and his father, who has a secret past, is accused of the crime Seth's world is suddenly turned upside down. However, Seth becomes fixated with a reclusive widow named Dolphin Blue and, convinced she is a vampire, believes she is responsible for the death of his friends. He also believes she is out to kill his older brother Cameron and will stop at nothing to save him.

This film deals with dark psychological territory that some viewers may find disturbing. However, I do recommend you watch this film as Philip Ridley has directed a film that shows how a child's imagination can be extremely overactive but also, it shows just how cruel the adult world can be.

The film is also shot in a very beautiful way. It oozes atmosphere and the use of colour in the film is fantastic. Ridley combines, successfully, the colours Blue, Yellow, Black, Grey and white and it just brings the film to life.

I do recommend this film to anyone, as i have done to my friends who have loved it. So, rent it out. Sit down. Enjoy.

The Reflecting Skin fmovies. Really a good film. Definitely worth finding. I guess the only place you can score "The Reflecting Skin" is ebay, but I would recommend shelling out the few extra bucks. It's worth it. It would spoil the film to give away too much. And director Philip Ridley interweaves everything together masterfully. I mean MASTERFULLY. When you watch it you'll know what I mean.

Young Seth lives in rural America at the end of WWII. Kids are getting killed in the town. Seth and his friends are convinced his creepy neighbor lady who always wears sunglasses and is pale and British, is the culprit (and that she's a vampire). Seth's brother (played by a young Viggo Mortenson) comes home from the war and promptly falls in love with the neighbor lady. Of course, this horrifies Seth. And stuff even starts to happen to his brother to confirm his suspicions. But there's a reason. You probably shouldn't know more. There are a couple of different plot threads. They are all haunting. Especially the backstory involving Mortenson, which I found chilling. One monologue to the British lady about his experiences in the war he tells with absolute innocence (when you see it you understand, given the time period) is blood-curdling.

The scenery/cinematography is amazing. Lot of remarkable imagery. Stuffs that REALLY sticks in your mind. Not just the images of little kids bounding through wheat fields (which there are plenty of) but the way the houses seem utterly rooted into the landscape. The way the whole atmosphere has a strange, haunted feeling. Great stuff. Highly recommended. Nothing TOO terribly frightening, but LOTS of creepiness. Actually, the whole film is just plain creepy.

If you watch THE REFLECTING SKIN closely (or even not so closely) you'll notice that it sucks. This is a film that tosses in bits and pieces of imagery and motifs that might have come from American/Southern gothic sources like Sam Shepard, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, David Lynch, Anne Rice and Tobe Hooper (and others) -- but it fails to make its world seem the least bit vital or interesting. All we are left with are pseudo-disturbing characters and bits of imagery that don't want to fit together: the cliched townie puritans and religious fanatics, a dead baby, an English neighbor nearby who may or may not be a vampire, an hysterical mother with a husband who is a repressed homosexual, and most strangely there is a group of greaser murderer/pedophiles who drive around almost completely unnoticed in a shiny black Plymouth. This narrative is all led by a 9 year old protagonist boy named Seth Dove (and his stock set of small town friends) and his older brother Cam (played by Viggo Mortensen) who just returned from fighting the Japanese.

Not much really happens in this film except that there is a lot of yelling and menacing looks. Seth runs back and forth between the different characters and locales as though he were attending exhibits at the Yakpanatwa (sorry about the spelling) Country Fair for Southern Gothic Cliches. Occasionally he or one of his friends runs around draped in an American flag. Hmmm -- this must have some sort of deep meaning. But who cares about subtext when text is so boring and phony?

The film has some nice cinematography, which is what makes it tolerable to watch. But as it goes on you begin to realize that this over-emphasis on visual beauty is a kind of device to distract the audience from possibly realizing that there is nothing interesting going on.

Disparate stock characters and cliches from American gothic horror and southern gothic sources could be interesting if it all these elements were supported by a unique screenplay and guided by a gifted director (go rent Jim Jarmusch's DEAD MAN, which is not a great film, but a much better one that takes a similar approach to its material). But this writer/director unfortunately has little such skill in either department. The acting is mostly over the top (though many of the actors are good) and there is little suspense or mystery about the visual style and directorial approach. By trying to bombard the audience with style (especially the excruciatingly over the top orchestral and choral score) the director proves to have hardly any style at all.

One gets the sense that this director is not an American -- but for some reason felt compelled to try to say something deep and meaningful about America. One gets the sense that he doesn't really know these characters at all -- or the land they live on. Yet perhaps as a kid this director feverishly and fetishistically read and viewed materials about death, perversity and horror in the Midwest and Great Plains - and could only come up with a kind of Wisconsin Death Trip for Basic Cable. Nice try. Better luck next time.

British author and writer Philip Ridley has done very little in the field of cinema, but what there is, is more than interesting and great, especially in the case of this debut of his, Reflecting Skin (1990). The film stars Jeremy Cooper as a some 10 year old boy named Seth Dove, who lives in the rural areas of America in the 1950's, when the WWII is still very freshly in minds. Seth has friends whom he plays with like boys normally do, but it seems like they are always very cold and wicked towards each other, and that something isn't quite right. Seth's father and mother are also more than ominous and weird. Soon Seth's older brother arrives in home from WWII in which he served during the bombing of Japan. Brother Cameron is played by Viggo Mortensen, and first he and Seth seem to be very close with each other, but not for long. Also, a weird lady lives near Seth's house and the lady - despite being very attractive - is also very bizarre and threatening, and almost like a vampire in a fairy tales, which Seth's father happens to read all the time. There's no need to tell more about the plot, you've got it by this point that this film isn't going to be any optimistic and positive pack of 90 minutes entertainment. This is nearly as disturbing as possible, and has characters and settings which would make (and hopefully have made or will make) David Lynch give a huge hug to Philip.

Reflecting Skin is the kind of film a director manages to do perhaps just once during his career. It tries to reach the top which is so high, it is almost impossible to succeed or at least succeed more than once in subsequent films. Reflecting Skin - I have really come to this conclusion - really succeeds and how fantastically it does! I knew this film will be a tough and challenging one, but it was more, when I finally FINALLY managed to find it and watch it.

The film has absolutely zero likable characters or characters who can be described as good or good willing. They are all bad, others more and others less. Others may have had an opportunity not to become that way due to their young age, while others are so corrupted and rotten, they should have been 'saved' when they were still vulnerable kids themselves. This film shows the kind of things about childhood and growing up many parents wouldn't probably even dare to thing about, but still I think this should be seen by every parent who is going to have or already has had a child who is waiting to be raised as a decent and undisturbed human being.

But what about Seth, since he is also very mean and selfish at many points? I think it is among the points and things which make this film so powerful and merciless, because there's absolutely no hope for the characters of the film, they're gone/destroyed for ever and others just can't take it and go completely insane and self destuctive. But there's hope for us, the viewers, who accept the film's challenging subjects and things from our everyday life. This film teaches, shows, enlightens and horrifies us as powerfully as it makes us wonder the visual beauty and settings of the film.

The visual eye of Ridley's is great and wonderful, and Reflecting Skin proved it for the first time in big screen. The collaboration of Ridley and cinematographer Dick Pope (The Way of the Gun) is among the greatest I've seen for long time. The fields and rural settings are so gorgeous and the colors in which they bathe really fill this film with cinematic magic, which is a