The Reflecting Skin (film)

Infobox_Film
name = The Reflecting Skin


director = Philip Ridley
producer = Dominic Anciano
writer = Philip Ridley
starring = Viggo Mortensen
Lindsay Duncan
distributor = BBC
Miramax Films
released = 9 September 1990 | runtime = 95 min.
language = English
budget =
music = Nick Bicât
cinematography = Dick Pope
country = UK
awards =
imdb_id = 0100469
|

"The Reflecting Skin" is a surreal 1990 film about a young child growing up in rural Idaho in the 1950s. The movie is directed by Philip Ridley, and features Viggo Mortensen and Lindsay Duncan. It is extremely difficult to find on home video.

The film weaves elements of the grotesque, vampirism, child sexual abuse, and religious zealotry throughout its narrative about the perceptions and fantasies of an impressionable pre-adolescent boy and his friends.

Plot

Young Seth Dove becomes obsessed with the idea of vampires and soon attaches his fixation onto a woman named Dolphin Blue. After his father’s suicide, Seth’s brother comes home from WWII and begins an affair with Dolphin, leaving Seth to become completely infatuated with the notion of his brother’s danger. Along with this, Seth finds himself at the mercy of an unstable mother along with a group of men, who plague the small children of Seth’s continually shrinking small town.

Awards

At the 1990 Locarno International Film Festival, Ridley won three awards, C.I.C.A.E. Award, the FIPRESCI Prize, and Silver Leopard. At the 1990 "Sitges" Catalonian International Film Festival, Lindsay Duncan won the Best Actress award and Dick Pope the award for Best Cinematography. At the 1990 Stockholm Film Festival, Ridley received the FIPRESCI Prize.

The film creates an eerie tone by placing the vast majority of its action outdoors around the delapitated farms and in the cornfields of Idaho (actually locations in Canada) shot in idyllic sunlight which belies the dark secrets and decadence of the characters and plot. The story is told in an objective, somewhat absurdist style, which recalls David Lynch by way of "Days of Heaven".

ee also

*List of films portraying paedophilia or sexual abuse of minors

External links

*imdb title|id=0100469|title=The Reflecting Skin