Very well executed

Strictly average movie

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Mischievous 8-year-old Seth Dove (a fine and credible performance by Jeremy Cooper) grows up in a harsh and godforsaken Idaho farmland area in the 1950's. His troubled older brother Cameron (the always excellent Viggo Mortensen) returns from a tour of duty in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Seth suspects that mysterious English widow Dolphin Blue (bewitching Lindsay Duncan) might be a vampire and a rash of horrific child murders upsets the tranquility of the otherwise sleepy rural region. Writer/director Philip Ridley astutely pegs the cruelty, bleakness, and nightmarishly ghastly unfair and unpredictable terror of the adult world as perceived through the confused and uncomprehending wide-open eyes as well as hyperactive imagination of a child. Moreover, Ridley not only does an expert job of creating and sustaining a strong mood of decay, despair, and melancholy, but also offers a grim, stark, and resolutely unsentimental evocation of the repressive 50's era. There's a dour austerity to this bold and provocative cinematic meditation on death, mortality, the loss of innocence, and the tragic fragility of uncertain human existence that gives it an extra haunting power. The sound acting from the capable cast holds the movie together: Duncan, Mortensen, and especially Cooper all do sterling work in their roles, with sturdy support from Sheila Moore as Seth's strict, bitter, and neurotic mother, Duncan Fraser as Seth's guilt-ridden pedophile dad Luke, Robert Koons as the gruff Sheriff Ticker, and David Bloom as a hard-nosed bully deputy. Dick Dope's breathtakingly gorgeous cinematography provides a lyrical golden-hued look. Nick Bicat's brooding and majestic score further enhances the exquisite moodiness of this highly recommended shocker.

"The Reflecting Skin" is among the most beautiful and elegiac movies I have ever seen.It's dark and depressing film which takes place during 50's.Philip Ridley's full-length debut features many memorable moments for example frog exploding in a torrent of blood and guts,a couple of chirping ladies walking close to Seth and carrying a dead seagull,a gruesome suicide that ended with a burning gas station and the discovery of the mummified baby in the barn.The water plays the major theme in "The Reflecting Skin".The film is extremely poetic with its bleak subject matter of loneliness and mourn.The cinematography of Dick Pope is breathtaking with some moody shots of the fields,rolling hills and big skies.Dreamy and strangely hypnotic "The Reflecting Skin" is an unforgettable trip into sadness and melancholy.9 out of 10.

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.