THE REFLECTING SKIN (1990) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Philip Ridley
Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Cooper,
Sheila Moore, Duncan Fraser, David Longworth
It looks like harvest time in the wheat fields of the Midwest, but nobody seems to be harvesting any wheat. It'a the late 1940s or thereabouts, and a boy named Seth (Jeremy Cooper) is just doing the kinds of things boys do - catching frogs, playing practical jokes, snooping around where he's not supposed to be, and wondering whether the widow in the next house over is a vampire. But there's something weird going on here, too, something you can't quite pin down, and neither can he. This is what it's like to grow up in an irrational universe, where the grownups make less sense than the kids, and the kids have to try to make sense of it all. An unsettling little coming-of-age movie made in Canada, beautifully scored and shot, with Viggo in an early role as the boy's much-admired older brother.
