The Reflecting Skin. 1990. UK/Canada. Written and directed by Phillip Ridley. With Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan, and Jeremy Cooper. DCP. 95 min.
The Reflecting Skin was declared a “cult film” by a cheeky critic minutes after its premiere screening at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. This color-saturated fantasy from writer-director Philip Ridley came from the same creative moment as his pioneering “In-Yer-Face” stage work in Britain, a movement characterized by its “blatant portrayals of physical and psychological violence.” By comparison, The Reflecting Skin, set on a post-nuclear American Midwestern landscape of isolated farmland, was praised for evoking the “prairie gothic aesthetic” of painters Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth and filmmaker Terrence Malick. The first in a horror-themed trilogy, the film is told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who escapes a troubled home life by fixating on the belief that a mysterious widow neighbor is a vampire determined to destroy his terminally ill brother (Viggo Mortensen, in an early starring role). Featuring themes that the artist has explored across mediums, the drama is motivated by an interest in the mysteries of adulthood seen from an adolescent perspective, the destabilizing effects of sexual desire, and questions of gender identity. It owes a measure of its uncanny effect to surreal cinema references, including dreamlike visual design reminiscent of silent-era Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer and the symbolism of leather clad “dark riders” cruising in a black Cadillac who derive from Jean Cocteau’s Orphee (1950).