Customer Reviews

Reflecting Skin [VHS]

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

A unique and deeply moving film by Philip Ridley. The dreamlike atmosphere never becomes disconnected from reality, which adds to the impact. Humorously oddball scenes suddenly become serious and human, while moments of quiet introspection are often interrupted by a jolt of unexpected hilarity. The moments of beauty and poignance go well beyond anything David Lynch has accomplished -- though Lynch fans would certainly enjoy this movie.

The excellent musical score sounds like a cross between Ralph Vaughan Williams (or Gerald Finzi) and Philip Glass on an exceptionally good day. There are several well-integrated references to moody icons: Andrew Wyeth's paintings, the stuffed birds of "Psycho" -- and in the breathtaking final sequence, the sliver of a cloud slicing across the moon (here, the setting sun) as it does at the start of "Un Chien Andalou," the root of the surrealist film tree.

This is absolutely *not* a movie for everyone. Those who have no patience with leisurely, meditative character studies -- or who couldn't care less about brilliant cinematography -- should stay away. On the other hand, fans of (for example) Ingmar Bergman's dark, intense films of the 1960s will love this movie.

"The Reflecting Skin" should already be on DVD. The fact that it's currently out of print even in VHS is little short of ... well, surreal.

Well, this one has been on my favorite movie list for quite some time. I haven't been able to view it for several years now but I recommend it to those who enjoy the darker (or deeper) side of film-making. Digging into the memory banks, I vividly remember the spectacular cinematography and powerful use of colors throughout the entire movie. Even though the pace is slow, its a perfect mix of creative thought and human expression, with a potential twist of insanity and madness. While working in a movie store, I had the pleasure of finding a select few who enjoyed this film as much as I did. Cohen bro's and Lynch fans should be well satisfied... Hollywood fans, I suggest something else. This film will hit all the right nerves for those who have "danced around the campfire" but those who prefer to live along a straight line... just stay away, you may end up being one of the dissatisfied reviewers making no sense. I agree completely with the already stated theme of humanity's loss of innocence, its an excellent approach to a very mindful movie. Potent and somewhat haunting images will be implanted into your mind and not everybody will find an appreciation for this film... its that simple. However, the film is not simple. It travels somewhere behind your mind's eye and where it ends up is up to you. For those of you who are avid fans of underground movies, I'd say this is a nice blend of Koyaanisqatsi, Fire Walk With Me and maybe a splash of Miller's Crossing... or something like that---

This a highly original, creepily surreal film dealing with the loss of innocence, the depths of irrational childhood fears, and the dark underbelly of middle America. If this description makes it sound like a David Lynch film, you're not far off the mark. Ridley's film shares with Lynch's work the artful, compositionally balanced cinematography, the disquieting psychosexual undertones, and, yes, even the wooden characters. The one-dimensional archetypes that populate this film have been criticized by many reviewers, but, as in Lynch's films, the "flatness" of the acting/dialogue serves an important purpose: the characters are mere canvases for the depiction of aspects of the work as a whole. The overall mood of the film is paramount, and the various libidinal energy flows underlying it are best served by characters who act as conduits for paticular eruptions of perversity and other compositions of incident which manifest in discreet situation rather than autonomous personality. The collective madness at the heart of America, the latent violence that came to a head with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, repressed sexualities, and oedipal sadism: this film is NOT easy to swallow. That the seemingly placid expanses of midwestern fields could incubate such twisted madness suggests that "the world's breadbasket" has been feeding us something far more sinster than corn and wheat.

Preamble: My review - one of the first on Amazon for this film - somehow got bumped out of here without my taking notice of it. Here is my original review from 1998 (typos removed and slightly edited to notice the number of reviews in the ensuing years).

The Reflecting Skin is clearly not a movie everyone will like. It requires dismissing all notions of what a movie "should be" - and going along for a fascinating ride filled with images that will burn themselves into your brain for a long time to come. Director Philip Ridley has assembled a remarkable cast who grasp their tough assignments and execute them with near zombie-like aloofness. The tragic characters populating his film are completely believable - but in that surreal, almost unnatural way that Shakespeare or Brecht's characters are also believable.

Like life itself, nothing in this tale is ever fully clear here and Ridley seems to be obsessed with symbolism and yet his symbols remain somehow beautifully ambiguous, capable of more than one - or possibly no meaning whatsoever. Any resolutions (or lack thereof) punctuating the story will prove to be frustrating and unsatisfying for those requiring challenging moments to be wrapped up as neat little packages explaining everything for them. Conversely, for anyone who loves to explore the myriad possibilities Ridley has opened up for us, The Reflecting Skin will be a dark, disturbing, sometimes comic and unfailingly beautiful film experience. The cinematography is never less than stunning - the images recalling Wyeth and at several points van Gough, it seems to me each frame of this film is a work of art in itself, and collectively the experience is overwhelming and memorable.

I've been surprised (though shouldn't be) to read how many found this movie to be boring, as everyone I've shown this film to has been riveted by it from start to finish. Let's examine its characters (minor spoilers here, but not really):

Seth Dove, a troubled and abused [...] growing up on a farm possessing a penchant for "exploding frogs" and an overactive, dark imagination. From that imagination springs his own, disturbing answers to life's troubling questions, uncensored and unfiltered. A child you want to love, yet fearful of.

Cameron, Seth's older brother, physically and mentally affected by military nuclear testing on the Bikini Islands from where he's just returned, damaged and very changed.

Then there is Mom; demented, abusive and utterly miserable, the sort of woman whose daily existence goes nearly unnoticed, save for her torment and tormenting.

The father; a gentle, sad and tortured soul, destroyed by a long ago indiscretion from which no one seems capable of forgiving him. This sad sack finds escape only in pulp vampire novels (part of a rich symbolic motif woven through the entire film).

There is Dolphin Blue, the sad widowed neighbor - a lonely displaced British woman brought to the American heartland by her husband. Seth is convinced she is in reality a murderer, a 200 year old vampire feeding off his beloved brother.

A gorgeous, black 1950's Cadillac Fleetwood which continually roams the countryside. She is filled with handsome, dangerously mysterious young men who glide in and out of the story like ghosts of the imagination.

There is the sheriff, self-righteous and bizarre. He is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, a buffoon and false villain" a divertissement who, while scarier than any other character in the story ultimately matters little to it.

We have another neighbor, a crazed lunatic whose insanity is comically fueled by alcohol, grief and disturbing dreams of bestiality.

Oh yeah, and then there's the "angel." A character I'll be haunted by whenever I think of this film.

While all of the performances are excellent, the central trio of Lindsay Duncan (Dolphin Blue), Viggo Mortensen (Cameron Dove) and most of all, young Jeremy Cooper (Seth Dove) are positively spellbinding.

The Reflecting Skin is a true masterpiece of filmmaking; a foreigner's haunting interpretation of American gothic both surrealistically visionary yet somehow wonderfully true. I know how this must sound, but it's precisely what I mean. See it and decide for yourself.

This is obviously a film you either love or hate - and I'm with the 'yea's! Actually, I've corresponded with Philip, the writer/director and he is a true Renaissance man (he is also a great painter, author, playwright and children's book author). Like my compatriot in SF, I also weep uncontrollably at the last five minutes; no matter how many times I've seen the film - I think it touches a very deep primal nerve in those of us who are haunted by the loss of childhood innocence! What more can I say - the film is brilliant, but obviously not for everyone!

Written and directed by Phillip Ridley... Phillip Ridley's (The Passion Of Darkly Noon) journey vis-a-vis into Vietnam, vandalism, vampirism, and viviparity in the Lynchesque "The Reflecting Skin". It's hard not to compare Ridley's visuals with Lynch, however, Lynch's visualizations are more "mainstream" type of feel than Ridley's, if you can believe that! That is what makes Ridley's films so odd, disquieting and singular and quite remote in their style.

9 year old Seth Dove lives in a surreal 1960s prairie community. His mother is abusive towards that whole family, his father is most likely a repressed homosexual who reads vampire pulp fiction, and his brother is just returning from Vietnam, Cameron who is obviously dying of radiation sickness but Seth is convinced that it is Dolphin Blue, the crazy English woman, who is sucking the life out of his big brother.

Seth and his friends torment the local English eccentric lady, Dolphin Blue, with exploding frogs in a great first scene. That is, until his best friends start turning up dead. Sheriff
Ticker, who knew about Seth's father's long ago penchant for young boys before he was married to Mrs. Dove, suspect the odd but harmless gas station owner. Mr. Dove ends up burdened over being a suspect in the young boy murders and so commits suicide in front of 9 year old Seth by gas pump. When bodies still turn up, the police and locals still suspect the father, even though he is dead and buried. For some reason, nobody connects the long black car filled with sinister teenage boys with the disappearances.

Even Seth, who pumped gas for them and even watched them kidnap the last of his friends,inexplicably blames the eccentric vampire neighbor lady, Dolphin Blue.

Watch this oddly surrealistic film and see for yourself what is happening to the Dove family.

Happy Watching!

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.

A great work with style and substance. Movies with The Reflecting Skin's surreal tone of storytelling are rare to find this well executed. Fans of Bergman, Lynch, excetera, will probably not be disappointed by Philip Ridley's superb direction. The heart, soul, terror, and strangness of childhoods various longings are perfectly conveyed. Personally, I rank this film as one of my favorites.

A wonderful film to watch again and again (but not if you like Hollywood-style story or action or dialogue). But if you like Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendricks and Philip Glass, and if you can at least imagine reading James Joyce, then the film is a must-see.

I disagree tremendously with chillwill from Oakland, Michigan. This is not an attempt to imitate the "cinematic art" of director Ed Wood. If you enjoy foreign and independent films, this one's for you. A style, look, feel and pace that is unlike any Hollywood excuse for an entertaining movie. Perfectly directed, the performances are unequalled and will draw you into all the character's lives and leave you mesmerized for the duration. Chilling, intense and bizarre situations makes this an extremely well crafted project. For Lynch, Cronenberg and Cohen Bros. fans. For you one-star freaks, go check out the Freddy Kruger section. That stuff's probably more up your alley.