The Reflecting Skin: The Nightmare Of Childhood

“Kids can be so cruel.” Let’s think about that for a second. It’s certainly true, as any veteran of childhood or adolescence can attest. But it’s also often used dismissively, as if it’s a self-evident statement, not something to explore. But it’s worth looking at more closely because it’s almost two sides of the same coin. Cruelty is part of innocence, because if you don’t know that what you’re doing hurts someone or something, you’ll do it, and you’ll laugh, and their pain is no lesser for it. It might even be worse. Childhood can be full of casual cruelty because often you haven’t yet learned regard for anything outside yourself. And all too often, horror sells the idea short by going no further than the idea that if it’s creepy when an adult does it, it’s even more creepy when a kid does it.

I’ve had the cult film The Reflecting Skin on my radar for awhile, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get around to it, because it’s really striking. It’s lyrical, haunting and strange, a story of cruelty, and tragedy, and innocence lost, all wrapped tightly together like a ball of venomous snakes.

It’s rural somewhere in the 1940s, a stretch of lonely farmhouses standing in oceans of wheat under an unblinkingly blue sky, and the film begins with summer childhood shenanigans, three friends playing out in the fields, up to some kind of mischief. It’s horrible, and bloody, and the three friends - Kim, Eben, and Seth - laugh and laugh and laugh at the prank they’ve pulled, oblivious to their own viciousness. In its wake, we follow Seth back home. His family runs a gas station and garage, and they’ve got another boy, Cameron, off fighting in the Pacific. There’s a peculiar, solitary woman who lives a little way. It was she who was the target of Seth and his friends, and he’s sent to apologize. She’s reclusive, pale to the point of colorlessness, clad all in black and although she looks young, she tells Seth very seriously that she is over two hundred years old.

Seth knows what she is. His father reads pulp novels about creatures like this.

What follows is the story of one summer in Seth’s life - the mysterious neighbor lady, the secrets everybody keeps, and a string of unexplained deaths striking at the little community’s most vulnerable members. It’s like an Andrew Wyeth painting came to cold, surreally detached life, and it’s a story suffused with pain. Everyone in this film is damaged somehow, estranged from their own feelings and experience, wounded by life in one way or another. There’s Seth’s mother, seething with rage at the disappointment of her life and taking it out on Seth and her husband alike. There’s Seth’s father, taciturn, resigned, passive and ultimately pathetic. Joshua, obsessed with his own sins, and Dolphin, the mysterious neighbor lady, brought from her home in England to this rural place by a husband now long-gone, repressed and constricted and utterly alone. And lurking in the margins, the sheriff and his deputy, both with eyes like stone, and a nameless young man in a black Cadillac, whose intentions are unclear but don’t seem wholesome at all. The result is a lot of cruelty, because everyone is disconnected from themselves and from everyone else, consumed by their own horrors and obsessions. And in childhood, you don’t know any better, so Seth, already damaged by his mother’s abuse, moves through this broken and damaged world, hurting and being hurt and not knowing the why of any of it, while real evil lurks right under everyone’s nose.

And it’s a story told vividly. This would never be mistaken for a realist piece or character study, not when everyone is so alien and alienated, but it leaps off of the screen. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, with color choices that can only be described as painterly, and careful consideration for composition in every shot. It’s full of little details and moments that aren’t exactly subtle, but convey the impression that everything about this film is pointed in the same direction, devoted to telling this story using every means at its disposal. Hell, there are moments where even the editing is breathtaking and evocative. The orchestral score is lush, prickly and foreboding, giving it the feeling of some kind of timeless fable, and the result is rife with a sense of strangeness. It’s a film that is perfectly willing to have bizarre things happen and not bother to explain them (the sheriff’s introduction is both startling and oddly funny, and Seth finds…something…in the barn that becomes a confidante), but at the same time it doesn’t feel gratuitous or contrived. It’s a bleak existence seen through the eyes of a child, and even if it doesn’t make literal sense, it makes emotional sense. The whole thing feels like a languorous nightmare.

I think it’s lazy to call things “Lynchian,” and all too often just means something is a little quirky, but here I think it does make sense. Thematically, it operates on a somewhat similar wavelength – everything and everyone seems at a slight remove from reality and each other, as if they’re sleepwalking through their own lives and only capable of communicating in the most direct, emotionally naked way possible without the heat of actual emotion. There’s a strong undercurrent of desire contorted by repression as well, and the suggestion of a small town hiding dark secrets, so I definitely see similar notes to Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, but maybe less hermetically sealed, if that makes sense. It’s a story of growing up and the loss of innocence, and a story about wounded people trying to find connection, and a story about the senselessness and inexplicability of sudden untimely death, a fable told in the merciless glare of a perpetually, unbearably blue summer sky. I don’t think I’ve seen something that hit me like this since Possession, and though this doesn’t plumb that film’s lunatic depths, it comes a lot closer that most anything else I’ve seen.

IMDB entry
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