The Reflecting Skin (1991)

The Worst Film Ever

the audience applauded

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Absolutely brilliant

I admit. I missed it. There is clearly some sort of metaphor and symbolism at work. The semi-surreal background kept he thinking about what is really happening. Seth Dove(Jeremy Cooper)is a young boy with a wild imagination growing up on a farm in Idaho. He believes the widow (Lindsay Duncan) next door is a vampire. His name oozes with symbolism, but I missed it. I suppose the symbolism involves the title, "The Reflecting Skin" which is mentioned late in the film.His brother Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) shows up from watching a-bomb tests and falls in love with the woman whose dead husband's name was Adam. More of the metaphor? Adam's first wife was supposed to have been a succubus according to lore. There is diverse religious discussions among the kids involving angels. The black Cadillac??? Was that the grim reaper?At times I felt I was going to watch another "Sailor Who Fell From Grace From the Sea" combined with "Summer of '42" combined with "Pan's Labyrinth". Sheila Moore, as the mom reminded me of the moms I grew up with before Valium. The movie had been fascinated and interested the whole time. If I had caught the symbolism, I would have perhaps gone 5 stars.Parental Guide: No f-bombs, adult themes. Male rear nudity (Viggo) and B&W photo. I obtained this film on a horror film 8-pack at Walmart, although this is not really a horror film.

I tried this movie because I saw IMDb list one this day giving this movie a number 1 Foreigner horror movie. The idea of a kid having to fight alone against a vampire is not really original but in a rural setting of United States can end up being interesting. And it was the number 1 movie, again, even outpacing the Spanish The Orphanage (which I totally consider excellent). OK, I should have read the summary better because I didn't know how much wrong I was. This movie is very idiotic, from a logical standpoint. There's way too many important points thrown in the story that leads to absolutely anywhere, and I can't stop thinking "where this is going?". Let me spoil you the fun: the movie is a story of a bunch of pedophiles, running in a black car, kidnapping and killing kids in a remote rural neighborhood. The main character is a 8 years old boy that end up believing that her neighbor is a vampire. He is taunted by the pedophiles, he witness his friend being taken by the gang, but he continues convict that her neighbor, an around thirties lonesome lady, is culprit for all the dead bodies. I know that some people that likes the movie will say that the story is a creative analogy to a little boy imagination in a story of sexual abuse to kids, but the problem is that the main character is too smart to be so blind. The way that the scenes depict the characters forces to not understand why the boy is so attached to his imagination. I can understand that the grown ups doesn't help either, being 1 lunatic worse than the other. On the good side, the movie has a photography very morbid for an always sunny environment which made recall the photography from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (specially for the palette of colors chosen). The score is also strange, because is full of violins and cello, that brings a drama vibe to the scenes that I found it doesn't fit to a thriller story, but it has some poetry on it. Anyway, I really don't understand how people can like a movie that is so non-sensical like this. It begins without any sense and it finish worse. Go figure..

As a psychologist who has worked with child abuse victims and their families for over 30 years, and as a survivor of horrific child abuse myself, I would say that The Reflecting Skin is the most psychologically accurate depiction of child abuse that I've ever seen. And certainly the most uncompromising in terms of not romanticizing the victim. In The Reflecting Skin--SPOILER ALERT--the central victim is an 8-year-old farm boy, who is traumatized at one time or another by nearly everyone in his life. His mother, Ruth, rejects him and punishes him with water poisoning. His father, Luke, commits suicide in front of him. A depressed young widow, Dolphin Blue, terrorizes him with details of her husband's suicide and remnants of his corpse she has saved in a cigar box. Even his beloved older brother, Cameron, who himself is a victim of both his mother's incestuous advances and the US military's atomic testing program in the Pacific, is sometimes physically and emotionally abusive towards him—at one point showing him the photo of a Hiroshima baby with "reflecting skin," from which the film takes its names. But unlike the usual tearjerker Hollywood movie about child abuse, Seth is no more an "innocent angel" than is his brother or his father or his friends who get murdered. At the point we meet Seth running through a Van Gogh-colored field with a huge toad in his hands, he is already turning into the next generation of abuser—happily blowing up that toad with air the same way his mother blows him up with water. And he manages to retaliate against one of the adult abusers in his environment, Dolphin Blue, in the process. But he doesn't mean to kill her. Yet that is where his silence about the gang of serial killers he sees roaming the country roads in a black Caddy finally leads. That is the realization that finally shatters him. But what alternative to silence does he have? The best chance he has of stopping the killers is when Sheriff Ticker tries to force him into spilling his secrets. Yet the sheriff is so verbally abusive to Seth—even to the point of threatening to split Seth's head open to get the truth out of him—that Seth freezes and says nothing. Like most abused kids Seth believes that he's entirely on his own. And to judge from all the negative reviews of this film he has reason to feel that no one will understand him and know how to help him. Because of all the abuse he's already internalized at the point the film begins, he is no more lovable as a victim than the mummified fetus he tries to make his friend.

The Reflecting Skin appears to be a film that is dividing opinions among all those who have seen it. I did really want to like it; but unfortunately the fact is that the film just isn't nearly as good as it could have been, and the result is a stylish mess with a handful of good ideas. The main problem with the film from my point of view is the fact that there's no actual story to it; there's some flow to the plot, but it doesn't seem to have any meaning, which means that the film ends up with only the imagery to lend it any substance; and this isn't enough to keep the film interesting. The film takes place in the middle of a desert sometime during the 1950's. The main character is Seth Dove; a young kid that gets his kicks by exploding frogs and vandalising people's homes. His family harbours some dark secrets, which come to the fore when a neighbourhood kid is killed. Meanwhile, his father's stories of vampires have lead the kid to believe that a woman that lives nearby may be one of the undead.The film is often labelled as a part of the horror genre; but aside from some vague notions of vampirism, the film really isn't horror. I suppose it would be best described as fantasy. The main problem with the film is undoubtedly the poor script, which features terrible dialogue and doesn't properly address many issues; for example, the kid coming to believe that his neighbour is a vampire emerges after a thirty second dialogue between father and son about a vampire book! The film is not helped by the lead character; Seth Dove is not easy to like at all - his actions and mannerisms made me hate the kid. The acting is not particularly good either; lead actor Jeremy Cooper unsurprisingly had only a couple of film credits after this one, while Viggo Mortensen appears before he would go on to mature into a good performer. I do have to admit that the film is not a complete dead-loss; in terms of substance it is, but at least the style of the film is good; director Phillip Radley makes good use of the locations and there are also a handful of good ideas blended into the film. Overall, however, I can't recommend this film.