Purely Joyful Movie!

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The 2009 Australian film "In Her Skin" is based on a true story of a mentally unstable woman and her obsession with a neighbor girls perfect life. Its a story of two families dealing with heartbreak, class structures, self esteem and who is to blame.Guy Pearce and Miranda Otto play Mike and Elizabeth Barber the upper middle class parents of Rachel, a 15 year old Dancer, who goes missing after accepting a job from an estranged older friend named Caroline, played fearlessly by Ruth Bradley. The girls exist at opposite ends of the class and popularity spectrum. Rachel is young and beautiful with and equally beautiful boyfriend. She has two loving parents and a normal home life. While Caroline, who is in her early to mid 20s, lives alone in an apartment always on the brink of some kind of mental breakdown. Her parents are divorced and her father has long given up hope of having a "normal" daughter. He has had learn to just deal with her craziness after having to bail her out of situations her whole life. Caroline works a dull and dreary office job with little to no motivation to do anything more with her life. Rachel has been a sort of obsession and role model of hers every since she babysat for her years back. An idealized version of what she wish she could be. Caroline feels trapped and cursed to roam the earth in her overweight and unattractive body. She is unloved and unwanted. We can only watch as the clock ticks forward to an enviable breakdown. After Rachel doesn't return home one afternoon. Her parent start to worry and call her friends and the dance studio with no luck. They go to the police but are devastated to be told that Rachel must have ran away or is just out on a bender and will probably show up in a day or two. With all of the other more important cases, they can't be wasting their precious recourses on a missing teenage girl. Mike and Elizabeth do eventually find an investigator dedicated to finding what happen to Rachel and it all leads back to Caroline.The film is uniquely structured in that it is split up into three sections dealing with the individual characters view points and personal struggles. After a brief intro we start with a title card "Mike and Elizabeth", Then go on to "Caroline", then finally "Rachel". The resulting story is raw, honest, and heartbreaking. It is superbly acted by all involved and unlike most Hollywood studio movies doesn't offer any easy answers.

In Her Skin (2009)Rather compelling. And a knock out performance by one of the leads, the troubled young girl Caroline played by Ruth Bradley.This is a real life story of a murder of a girl in Australia (and the production is Aussie, so sometimes the accents a bit think for an outsider). It strives for basic realism, so the acting and photography and editing are fairly straight forward. And well done.Because of these very same things, the movie doesn't rise above. It depends on the story to make it special, and of course the story is sordid and scary, but it isn't actually so unusual in our murderous world. So things stay firmly rooted all along.What you might expect after awhile is some insight into the girls, and the families around them, since this is almost entirely what the movie is about. In a more obvious way, the theme also centers on beauty and the opposite of beauty. The two girls, Caroline the overweight angry kid and Rachel the successful dancer kid, are opposites in almost every way. The way society makes judgments, and the way girls see themselves through society's lens, are very much what (apparently) led to the eventual violence.Oddly enough, even though I like this, it isn't necessarily special enough to recommend. Maybe if the themes sound good, go for it. Or the idea of a simple, realistic glimpse of modern upper middle class Australia.

Australian screenwriter, producer and director Simone North's feature film debut which she wrote, is based on a novel called "Perfect Victim" from 2003 by Australian writer Elisabeth Southall and UK journalist Megan Norris. It was screened at the Brisbane International Film Festival in 2010 and is an Australian production which was shot on location in Melbourne, Australia and produced by producer Tony Cavanaugh. It tells the story about Rachel Elizabeth Barber, a 15-year-old dancer from Melbourne who disappears on a spring day in 1999. Her father Mike and her mother Elizabeth contacts the local authorities, but as there is no evidence of something criminal having happened to Rachel no search is instigated by the police and Mike and Elizabeth has to begin investigating on their own to find their eldest child.Subtly and intimately directed by Australian filmmaker Simone North, this finely paced fictional tale which is narrated by the female protagonist and from multiple viewpoints, draws a gripping portrayal of an Australian family and their strive to locate their missing teenage daughter. While notable for it's colorful milieu depictions, fine production design by Australian production designer Peta Lawson and cinematography by Australian cinematographer Jules O'Loughlin, this dialog-driven, narrative-driven and heartrending thriller-drama which examines humane and psychological themes, depicts a nuanced study of character and contains a great score by Australian composer Ben Frost which emphasizes it's lingering atmosphere.This authentic and unsettling story which explicitly describes the complex personality of a disturbed woman who is marred by her self-perception and conflicting relationship with her parents, and the hardships of a loving mother and father, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, substantial character development, the fine acting performances by English-born Australian actor Guy Pearce, Australian actress Miranda Otto, New Zealand actor Sam Neill and the profound acting performance by Irish-Canadian actress Ruth Bradley. An incisive, empathic and lyrical directorial debut which is inspired by real events that took place in Melbourne, Australia in the late 20th century.

The title it played in Germany at the Fantasy Filmfest. A very strange little movie, that is very dark and will very likely appall a lot of people (if they don't know what they're in for especially), because of it's theme, but also because of it's graphic nature (at times, not that often, but still quite disturbing).The actors involved in here are all good, Guy Pearce giving a better performance (there must be a better script at hand I reckon) than in "Don't be afraid of the Dark". One of our lead actresses has to go to really tough places and she manages to do so very convincingly. Not for everyone and I'm not sure "enjoy" would be the right word to use after watching it, but this is a really good work of art!