The story of a young boy, Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper), who becomes intrigued by the idea that someone in his local area is a vampire, The Reflecting Skin is a strange, but also quite wonderful, coming-of-age story that uses a light touch throughout to blend darkness and sunshine until an end scene that hits you like a punch in the gut.
Enjoying hijinks with his friends, including a horrible trick in the opening sequence that involves an inflated frog and a catapult, young Seth is a very typical, spirited, lad. His life starts to take a turn, however, when children start to go missing, and then turn up dead. While the local law enforcement suspect Seth’s father, Seth himself starts to suspect a neighbouring single woman, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan). She could well be a vampire, and that is much more worrying when his brother (Cameron, played by Viggo Mortensen) returns from his military service and begins to develop a connection with Dolphin.
Written and directed by Philip Ridley, who also did the excellent, and underseen, Heartless (2009), as well as a few other movies well worth your time, this is a sun-kissed journey towards a face to face encounter with pure evil that brings to mind the work of various people, from David Lynch to Stephen King, while also feeling resolutely unique.
Great performances come from young Cooper, as well as everyone else onscreen, but it can be hard to recognise how well they are doing as Ridley uses people to enact moments in a slightly artificial way at times. Mortensen and Duncan become the focus of the film in the second half, but they are often being watched by Cooper’s character, which means some things are played up to show his interpretation of what he is seeing. Sheila Moore and Duncan Fraser play their characters, the parents of our lead, with obvious signs of problems in their lives, and they make a hell of an impression, especially when you think of their relatively small amount of screentime.
The Reflecting Skin is shot beautifully, with Dick Pope due some extra kudos there, and it seduces viewers with a constant sense of innocence as things move closer and closer to that innocence being lost. It shows the “silly” things that children decide to fixate on, and be afraid of, while other dangers lurk in plain sight around them. It manages to still play out like a vampire movie, but it puts forward the idea that vampirism takes on many different forms as people have their life energy reduced by various factors, both external and internal.
8/10
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